Scenes of Sympathy

Scenes of SympathyIdentity and Representation in Victorian Fiction

Audrey Jaffe

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and L ondon

Copyright © 2000 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book,or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permissionin writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell UniversityPress, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visitour website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

First published 2000 by Cornell University Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jaffe, Audrey. Scenes of sympathy : identity and representation in Victorian fiction / Audrey Jaffe. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-3712-0 (cloth) — ISBN-13: 978-0-5017-1989-9 (pbk.) 1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Capitalism and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. Literature and society—Great Britain—History—19th century. 4. Group identity in literature. 5. Sympathy in literature. 6. Mimesis in literature. I. Title.PR878.C25 J34 2000823ʹ.809—dc21 99-047449

The text of this book is licensed under a Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Cover illustration: Houseless and Hungry, watercolor by Luke Fildes (probably 1860s).The Forbes Magazine Collection, New York © All rights reserved.

Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/AndrewW. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.

Contents

A cknow ledgm ents vii

In troduction i

P a r t I Sympathy and the Spirit of Capitalism

1 Sympathy and Spectacle in D ickens’s

“A Christm as Carol” 27

2 D etecting the Beggar: A rthur C onan Doyle,

H enry Mayhew, and the C onstruction o f Social Identity 47

P a r t II Fear of Falling

3 U n d er Cover: Sympathy and Ressentiment

in Gaskell s Ruth 77

4 Isabels Spectacles: Seeing Value in East Lynne 95

P a r t III The Aesthetics of Cultural Identity

5 C onsenting to the Fact:

Body, N ation, and Identity in Daniel Deronda 121

6 E m bodying Culture: D orian s W ish 158

Index 181

Acknowledgments

I have benefited from the w isdom o f the following friends and col- leagues, w ho read and com m ented on various parts o f the manuscript at var-ious times: D eborah Dyson, C atherine Gallagher, Jean Gregorek, Nicholas Howe, Beth Ina, Jill Matus, M ary A nn O ’Farrell, Linda Raphael, David Riede, Peter Schwartz, Julie Solomon, David Suchoff, H erbert Tucker, and Susan Williams. I am also grateful to audiences at the Dickens Project in Santa Cruz, the University o f Virginia, Texas A&M, and O hio State for their responses. Portions o f the book have appeared, in somewhat different forms, in the following publications: Chapter i as “Spectacular Sympathy: Visuality and Ideology in Dickens’s A Christmas C a r o l P M L A 109 (1994): 254-65; Chapter 2 as “Detecting the Beggar: A rthur Conan Doyle, H enry Mayhew, and ‘T he M an w ith the Twisted Lip,’ ” Representations 31 (1990): 96-117, © 1990 by the R egents o f the University o f California; and C hapter 3 as “U nder Cover o f Sympathy: Ressentiment in Gaskells Ruth ” Victorian Literature and Culture 21 (1993): 51-65 . 1 am grateful for permission to reprint.

M any o f the ideas that in form this book em erged in discussions w ith Peter Schwartz, no t the least o f w hose contributions was to suggest that I read a Sherlock H olm es story called “T he M an w ith the Twisted Lip.” A nd it is a pleasure, once again, to acknow ledge the undeconstructable sympathy and intellectual energy o f M ary A nn O ’Farrell.

For Eli Jaffe Schwartz, a message: M om has w ritten a book, and pretty soon, if you w ant to, you can read it.

vii

Introduction

Th e following two passages, illustrations offered in support o f theoretical arguments, frame the period and the issues under discussion in this book. T he first is a late-tw entieth-century, confessional reflection on a California street scene; the second, an eigh teen th-cen tury philosophical fiction. Together they define a continuum : a recurren t narrative about sympathy, spectatorship, and the spirit o f capitalism.1

Several times a week I must negotiate my way past the crowds o f home-less people on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley Every time I do so, I amovercome with irrational panic__ Then, one day, I realized that I alwaysstudiously avoided looking at the homeless people, whom, with ruthless arbitrariness, I either help or don’t help. And I began to understand that my panic on these occasions is not just economic but specular. W hat I feel myself being asked to do, and what I resist w ith every fiber o f my being, is to locate myself within bodies which would, quite simply, be ru-inous o f my middle-class self—within bodies that are calloused from sleeping on the pavement, chapped from their exposure to sun and rain,

1 I use this phrase— obviously appropriated from Max Weber s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930)— to describe the way in which, under capitalism, economic rela-tions structure social relations. Weber s formulation is especially relevant to the kind o f street scene discussed here, in which people encounter one another primarily as economic subjects.

I

2 Introduction

and grimy from weeks w ithout access to a shower, and which can conse-quently make no claim to what, within our culture, passes for “ideality.”2

As we have no immediate experience o f what other men feel, we can form no idea o f the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiv-ing what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us o f what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that wecan form any conception o f what are his sensations__ It is the impressionof our own senses only, not those o f his, which our imaginations copy.3

These passages— the first from Kaja Silverm ans The Threshold o f the Visible World (1995), the second from Adam Sm ith’s The Theory o f Moral Sentiments (1759/ 1790)— link sympathy and spectacle in a way that, I will argue in this book, takes paradigmatic form in V ictorian fiction. In each, a confrontation betw een a spectator “at ease” and a sufferer raises issues about their m utual constitution; in each, the sufferer is effectively replaced by the spectator’s image o f h im or herself. As instances o f w hat I w ish to call “scenes o f sympathy,” these two passages, along w ith o ther scenes and texts discussed in the chapters that follow, docum ent m odern sympathy’s

2 Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (N ew York: Routledge, 1995), 26. “Ideality” is Silverman’s name for the “ego-ideal” or idealized self expressed in, and indeed indistinguishable from, “an idealized image o f the body” (70). “There is perhaps no more fundamental manifestation o f these kinds o f ‘difference’ [gender, race, class, sex],” Silverman writes,

than the customary reluctance on the part of the sexually racially, or economically priv-ileged subject to identify outside of the bodily coordinates which confer that status upon him or her, to form imaginary alignments which would threaten the coherence and ide-ality of his or her corporeal ego. Typically, this subject either refuses “alien” identifications altogether, or forms them only on the basis of an idiopathic or assimilative model; he or she imaginatively occupies the position of the other, but only in the guise of the self or bodily ego. This kind of identification is familiar to all of us through that formula with which we extend sympathy to someone less fortunate than ourselves without in any way jeopardizing our moi: “I can imagine myself in his (or her) place.” (25)

Silverman in fact defines the conventional formula— the self in the other’s place— as a refusal to identify, on the grounds that doing so would endanger the corporeal ego.

3 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1976), 9.

Introduction 3

inseparability from representation: bo th from the fact o f representation, in a text s swerve toward the visual w hen the topic is sympathy, and from is-sues that surround representation, such as the relation betw een identity and its visible signs. T h e V ictorian subject, as num erous studies have po in ted out, was figured crucially and w ith increasing emphasis as a spec-tator; as such, moreover, that subject was frequently called upon to w atch— and to participate in— a continual drama o f rising and falling for-tunes. In such a context, these scenes illustrate, econom ic status signifies visibly and spectatorship is inseparable from self-reflection. Society b e -comes a field o f visual cues and its m em bers alternative selves: im aginary possibilities in a field o f circulating social images, confounded and in ter-dependent projections o f identity.4

4 There is an immense body o f literature about modernity and spectatorship. I am espe-cially indebted to Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (N ew York: Vintage, 1978). Elaine Hadley describes a late-eighteenth-century shift from secure, paternalistic social relations to a specular market culture, in which “the vast array o f customary rights and obligations, for so long central to rural society, gives way to enclosure and leaseholds. In short, kinship rights and responsibilities are replaced by contractual obligations among discrete and contending economic parties__ The ranks became increasingly like strangers to one another, both lit-erally and figuratively.” Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1880-1883 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 18-19. For a fundamental discussion o f the idea o f theatricality in this connection, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1330-1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Guy Debord articulates the connection between capitalism and spectatorship as follows: “In societies where modern conditions o f production prevail, all o f life presents itself as an immense accumulation o f spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983). In Discipline and Punish (N ew York: Pantheon, 1976), M ichel Foucault lo-cates the origins o f modernity in the Panopticon s construction o f a subject o f imagined visibility: a disciplinary subject who imagines him or herself as always under surveillance. Foucault s model resembles Smith’s idea o f the imagined “impartial spectator” who regu-lates individual behavior in ethical society; in each case, as in my argument about sympathy, the construction that explains social behavior takes shape as an imaginary scene. As I argue in more detail in Chapter 1, the capitalist subject is also a self-scrutinizing one, and the spec-tator— the individual who, as in Debord s remark, sees life as representation— the prototyp-ical consumer. For further discussions o f spectatorship and modernity, see Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1993); Deborah Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Rachel Bowlby,Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser,

4 Introduction

Smith depicts sympathy no t as a direct response to a sufferer bu t rather as a response to a sufferer’s representation in a spectator s mind. As Peter de Bolla points out, for Smith, “sympathetic sentim ent is, in the last analysis, ‘imaginary.’ ”5 Each participant in w hat has com e to be called, no t inci-dentally, “the sympathetic exchange,” envisions him self (and bo th partici-pants are, for Smith, implicitly male) as the o ther must see him . T he result is the transform ation o f sympathy w ith the o ther into sympathy w ith the self—a self already figured as representation. “As they are constantly con-sidering w hat they themselves w ould feel, if they actually were the sufferers, so he is as constantly led to im agine in w hat m anner he w ould be affected if he was only one o f the spectators o f his ow n situation” (22). In Sm ith’s form ulation, w hen sympathetic spectator and sufferer occupy different places in the social hierarchy (the problem w ith im agining the o ther’s position is, after all, that “we ourselves are at our ease”), w hat circu-lates in the spectator’s m ind are positive and negative cultural fantasies: im -ages o f social degradation and, simultaneously, o f w hat Silverman calls “ide-ality” T he scene o f sympathy in effect effaces bo th its participants, substituting for them images, or fantasies, o f social and cultural identity. A nd it is because o f the interdependence o f and continual oscillation be-tw een images o f cultural ideality and degradation in the scenes I discuss

Gissing, and Zola (N ew York: Methuen, 1985) Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). For a recent discussion o f the role o f race in similar scenes, and o f the way the image o f the spectator replaces that o f the object in narratives o f slavery, see Saidiya V Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror; Slavery; and Self Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), chap. 1.

Between Smith and Victorian fiction comes, for the purposes o f this narrative, Wordsworth, in whose work sympathy appears as a similarly specular relation between ob-server and observed, and w ho, in ways too complex to be enumerated here, repeatedly dis-places the social into the poetic. Wordsworth often constitutes poetic authority in narra-tives o f social difference that give way to assertions o f likeness, as a character— the solitary reaper or leech gatherer, for instance— becomes an occasion for the poet’s reflections on his own authority and creativity. For my purposes, the most relevant recent commentary on such displacements and their role in constructing the liberal subject is Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). See also David G. Riede, Oracles and Hierophants: Constructions of Romantic Authority (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).

5 Peter DeBolla, “The Visibility o f Visuality,” in Vision in Context, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (N ew York: Routledge, 1996), 75.

Introduction 5

here— products o f the im agination o f a spectator positioned, phantasm ati- cally, betw een them — that I consider Sm ith’s scene o f sympathy to stand bo th as a prim al scene in the history o f sympathetic representation and as a visual em blem o f the structure o f middle-class identity.6

Kaja Silverman offers the passage cited above to illustrate a thesis about the bodily determ ination o f self-image. T hough no t explicitly about sym-pathy, her narrative renders manifest, even as it raises questions about, the im plicit threat the homeless sufferer poses to a middle-class observers identity. W hat, for instance, in this narrative, accounts for the “ruthless ar-bitrariness” that bestows m oney on som e beggars bu t no t on others? W hat logic links “econom ic” and “specular” panic? A nd w hen Silverman feels she is being “asked” to inhabit a body o ther than her own, w ho or w hat is doing the asking? T he act o f looking, in her account, fills the spec-tator w ith the anxiety o f bodily contagion, the fear o f inhabiting the beg-gar’s place. T hat anxiety is w arded o ff by im agining a self victim ized by the m ere sight o f a person w ithou t a hom e: the middle-class self on dis-play here is a self assaulted by the visual, one w ith no apparent defense against the draining o f funds, feeling, and identity to w hich that sight is felt to lead. D esiring her money, the foundation o f her ideality, the beggar threatens her place, and in the bourgeois im agination there are never enough places to go around. G iven the close relationship betw een identification and vio lent appropriation— w hat D iana Fuss has called “killing off the o ther in fantasy in order to usurp the o th e r’s place, the place w here the subject desires to b e”— one has to wonder, in Silverman’s account, w ho is killing w hom ? Im agining that the o ther wants her iden-tity, her “ideality,” the spectator wards o ff the threat as only a spectator can, “killing o f f ’ the o ther by refusing to look .7

6 M y idea o f the scene o f sympathy is indebted to Mary Ann Doane s discussion o f the term “scenario”: “Spectatorship in the cinema has been theorized through recourse to the ‘scenario’ as a particularly vivid representation o f the organization o f psychical processes. The scenario— with its visual, auditory, and narrative dimensions— seems particularly ap-propriate in the context o f film theory.. . . Freudian and Lacanian texts appear to be priv-ileged at least partially for their ability to generate convincing scenarios which act as con-densations o f several larger psychical structures or as evocations o f a particularly crucial ‘turning point’ or movement.” The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940’s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 13-14.

7 Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (NewYork: Routledge, 1995), 9.

6 Introduction

T he specular panic Silverman describes here is, she recognizes, an effect o f capitalist econom ics. T he passage reveals the same anxiety about “fel-low feeling” Sm ith does w hen he w rites that “persons o f delicate fibres and a weak constitu tion o f body com plain, that in looking on the sores and ulcers w hich are exposed by beggars in the streets, they are apt to feel an itching or uneasy sensation in the correspondent part o f their ow n bodies.”8 In bo th accounts the sight o f a sufferer, associated w ith requests for money, is im agined as physically invasive or contagious, a m etaphori-cal assault on the observer s person and a threat to the in tegrity o f his or her identity. W ere she to inhabit one o f the “calloused” and “grim y” b od -ies she sees, Silverman feels, she w ould no longer “precisely” be “her-self” (26), and the self she w ould no longer be is no t only a clean and well- rested one, bu t the perceived object o f appeal: the subject constituted as a culturally valued identity. Indeed, in Silverm an’s narrative, no actual re-quest is made: the m ere presence o f the homeless person is im agined as constituting such a request. T he scene suggests a negative version o f the Althusserian scenario o f interpellation, in w hich response to an appeal on the street— in that case, a policem an’s “hailing”— is said to transform the individual into a subject.9 H ere, the homeless person’s presence constitutes the appeal that form s the subject. B u t despite its idealizing effect, the o th e r’s gaze, rendering the spectator its object, poses a threat: a threat to w hich no t looking constitutes a response. N o t looking, Silverman denies the social self’s constitution in relation to o ther social selves; no t looking, she avoids the literal gaze that, as she imagines it, at once defines her as ideal and asks, she fears, for that ideality (not ju st for her money, that is, bu t for her life, w ith “life” defined as cultural life: the ability to participate in w hat Silverman elsewhere calls the culture’s dom inant fiction).10 Sil-verm ans claim that, “if homeless, I w ould precisely no longer be ‘m yself’ ” (26) defends against her obvious ability to make the identification: it de-fends against, even as it invokes, her im plication in the narrative o f decline, the image o f the self in the o th e r’s place. Sympathy in this scene, as in

8 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 10.9 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: N otes toward an

Investigation,” in Lenin and Philosophy (NewYork: M onthly Review, 1971), 127-86.10 See Silverman’s discussion o f this term in Male Subjectivity at the Margins (N ew York:

Routledge, 1992), 42-51*

Introduction 7

S m ith’s, is the nam e for a self engaged in an act o f self-definition and self- identification, and the middle-class self is the self that is repeatedly and paradigmatically called u pon to perform this act: the self that, looking anx-iously bo th high and low, circulates betw een positions in the sympathetic exchange, and never comes to rest in either one. Indeed, the fact that the sight o f a homeless person suggests to Silverman the possibility o f switched identities registers, as Celeste Langan writes, “ the pervasiveness w ith w hich [in a capitalist society] the m odel o f exchange governs all so-cial relations.” 11 T he threat encoded in the sympathetic exchange is that on w hich a capitalist econom y relies: the possibility that the spectator “at ease” and the beggar m ight indeed, someday, change places.

B oth passages collapse the difference betw een looking and no t looking; in both, the act o f looking at a sympathetic object provokes a narrative in w hich that object is by definition— the te rm “object” says it all— displaced into representation. T he tendency to ward off actual bodies in the sympa-thetic encounter, replacing them w ith cultural fictions and self-projections, com plicates C atherine Gallagher’s argum ent that fiction, in doing away w ith actual bodies, does away w ith the barrier that constitutes an obstacle to sympathy.12 For no t looking, literally or figuratively, accomplishes the same thing. Indeed, in Sm ith’s scenario, the sufferer has no nonfictional existence: sympathy by definition produces its object. Thus the distinction betw een sympathy for fictional characters and sympathy for actual people dissolves into— or rather, may be reform ulated as— the difference betw een the pleasurable sympathetic feelings fiction invites and the potential threat o f an encounter w ith an actual person. Pleasure, here, coincides w ith an absence o f reciprocity: a fictional character cannot look back. B ut in bo th accounts sympathy is fictional, in the sense that it is fundam entally in -volved w ith representation; in both , sympathetic representation takes place

11 Langan, Romantic Vagrancy; 223.12 Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the

Marketplace, 1670-1820 (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1995), 171. Gallagher’s ar-gument, which focuses here on Hume, is concerned with the relationship between sym-pathy, fiction, and property, the last term forming the “invisible link” between the first two. Her account emphasizes the difference between sympathy with actual people and sympa-thy with fictional characters, or “nobodies.” I argue that fiction draws much o f its power from the way readers have already imaginatively converted other persons into their own— in Gallagher’s and H um e’s term— “impressions.”

8 Introduction

w ith in and constitutes a cultural narrative about the identities o f sympa-thetic object and subject. T he dynam ic o f projection, displacement, and im agined exchange that appears in Smith, Silverman, and elsewhere in this book is the cultural narrative that shapes the sympathetic scene.

W hat I call “scenes o f sympathy” illustrate in exemplary fashion the way sympathy in V ictorian fiction takes shape in, and as, a series o f visualized narratives— narratives that render visible otherw ise invisible determ ina-tions o f social identity. By “render visible,” however, I do n o t m ean to sug-gest the presence o f some purifiable sympathetic essence underlying these scenes. R ather, I argue that sympathy in V ictorian fiction is inseparable from issues o f visuality and representation because it is inextricable from the middle-class subject’s status as spectator and from the social figures to w hose visible presence the V ictorian m iddle classes felt it necessary to for-m ulate a response. V ictorian representations o f sympathy are, as sympathy was for Smith, specular, crucially involving the way capitalist social rela-tions transform subjects into spectators o f and objects for one another; they are also spectacular, their representational dim ension reinforced by the spectatorial character o f V ictorian culture. N o t an attem pt to define sympathy per se, then, this book rather exposes and explores the recurrent connection betw een sympathy, representation, and constructions o f social identity in a series o f V ictorian texts. A nd my object, it follows, is no t the analysis o f authors bu t rather that o f texts and images, som e o f w hich (such as D ickens’s “A Christm as C arol”) have com e to represent V ictorian sym-pathy for tw en tie th -cen tu ry readers and audiences. Indeed, the fact that certain scenes tend to signify V ictorian sympathy in the contem porary popular im agination speaks directly to my purpose, since this phenom e-n on suggests the inseparability o f V ictorian sympathy from its particular representations and from representation itself.

T h e scene that, for my purposes, gives shape to and renders visible the meanings o f V ictorian sympathy involves a spectator’s (dread) fantasy o f occupying ano ther’s social place. T hough its conten t varies, w hat remains consistent is its reliance on a phantasm atic opposition betw een images o f cultural ideality and degradation. This opposition, also im agined as an at-tenuation o f the spectator’s identity, raises crucial questions about the structure and in terdependence o f V ictorian social identities; so too does

Introduction 9

the econom ic m etaphor that frequently inform s it, in w hich sympathy is represented as an investm ent in or exchange w ith others. W hat circulates in V ictorian representations o f sympathy— w hat these representations bo th circulate and reveal as constitu ted in that circulation— are social identities; in particular, scenes o f sympathy in V ictorian fiction m ediate and construct middle-class identities.

O ccupying the m etaphorical space betw een “h igh” and “low ” in V ictorian culture, the V ictorian middle classes simultaneously aspired to an aristocratic ideal and were haunted by the specter o f econom ic and so-cial failure. B ut incessant attention to their progress and distance from the low er classes suggests the anxious disavowal o f w hat was perceived as a con tinuum o f identity— the dependence, as M iriam Bailin puts it, o f “w ho one was” on “w ho one w asn’t, and, perhaps m ore im portant, w ho one no longer was.” 13 T he “objects” o f V ictorian sympathy are inseparable from V ictorian middle-class self-representation precisely because they embody, to a middle-class spectator, his or her ow n potential narrative o f social de-cline: they capture the fragility o f respectable identities psychically posi-tioned betw een high and low, defined w ith in the parameters o f a narrative o f rising and falling. Having, in effect, already been “seen” by the m iddle- class subject, they need no t— as in Silverm an’s narrative— be seen at all; they function for that subject as em bodim ents o f cultural possibility, im -ages o f w hat he or she m ight becom e. Indeed, the im agining o f the self in the o ther’s place on w hich C hristian charity and V ictorian sympathetic ideology typically rely— “there bu t for the grace o f G od go I” (sig-nificantly a refusal o f S m ith’s form ulation, sim ultaneously evoking and denying w hat the observer in the sym pathetic scene cannot help bu t im agine: the self in the o ther s place)— designates “place” as identity’s p ri-m ary com ponent: the difference betw een self and o ther appears, i f only mom entarily, as no th ing m ore than the difference betw een here and there.

T he emphasis in the following readings on visuality, framing, and rep-resentation calls attention to the powerful interplay betw een the specular quality o f V ictorian sympathy and the spectatorial character o f V ictorian culture. As I argue in particular for “A Christm as Carol,” cultural forms such as novels and films exist in a circular relationship w ith o ther struc-

13 Miriam Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 83.

i o introduction

tures o f spectatorship, n o t creating bu t rather giving m aterial form to the value w ith w hich particular objects and persons are invested. Similarly, cul-tural incitem ents to sympathy bo th depend on and reinforce the status o f the sym pathetic object as representation .14 T h e texts discussed in this book repeatedly stage sympathy as representation, as if the attem pt to feel for another across a social divide is necessarily m ediated by the image o f the self as image: the self perceived as an effect o f social determ inants. T he scene o f sympathy opens up a space betw een self and representation w hich gives way to a perception o f the self as representation; im agining the self occupying ano ther’s place is only a step away from im agining the self as merely occupying its own. W hat “place” signifies, then, is cultural possi-bility: a negative or, conversely, idealized image o f identity. Sympathy in V ictorian culture, I argue, is sympathy bo th for and against images o f cul-tural identity.

Sm ith’s scenario bears on this argum ent in a num ber o f ways; m ost significant is his recourse to a social, specular dynamic in order to explain how sympathy works. For Smith, sympathy requires a scene— both w ith in his ow n argum ent and in the m ind o f his hypothetical spectator. T he o ther’s experience, Sm ith argues, may be apprehended only through the m ediation o f the spectator’s self-image, and the sympathetic object is, in effect, a projection or fantasy o f the spectator’s identity. Smith s sympathy is a circulation o f representations, and his account o f sympathy is— it fol-lows— encapsulated in a series o f scenes illustrating the effect o f images o f suffering on a spectator. “W hen we see a stroke aim ed and just ready to fall upon the leg and arm o f another person,” Sm ith writes, “we naturally shrink and draw back our ow n leg or our ow n arm, and w hen it does fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hu rt by it as well as the sufferer.” 15 D e Bolla notes that “such sympathetic reactions are prim arily governed by w hat we see__ the visual is crucial in determ ining the entire system.” 16 B ut

14 For further discussion o f the relationship between sympathy and representation, es-pecially theatricality, see David Marshall, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury; Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (N ew York: Columbia University Press, 1986), and The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1988).

15 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 10.16 D e Bolla, “Visibility o f Visuality,” 75.

Introduction 11

the purpose o f the visual here is to produce secondary experience in a spectator, an image or copy o f pain w hose significance— better, interest (for there is no small degree o f scientific detachm ent here)— lies no t in its effect on the sufferer bu t rather in its representational potential: in the pow er o f its ripple effect, its capacity to reverberate in the spectator’s m ind and body, literally m oving the latter. (Paradoxically and yet characteristically, the sign o f the spectator’s liberality in this illustration— o f his, or, in S m ith’s language, “our,” expansive sensibility— is a “shrinking” away M arking sym-pathy itself as pain, the scene dramatizes the ambivalence inscribed in sym-pathetic spectatorship: the way it represents, simultaneously, bo th an ex-pansion and a potential dim inishm ent o f the spectator’s identity)

W ith the image o f the Panopticon, M ichel Foucault drew the form o f m odern subjectivity and theorized the m odern subject as a self-scrutinizing one. Sm ith’s scene o f sympathy sketches a class-inflected image o f this m onitoring, an image o f the construction o f subjectivity in a hierarchical bu t increasingly m obile society in w hich the middle-class self exists in a perpetually vexed relationship w ith the figures o f social difference that sur-round it. Smith, im agining sympathy as a scene, tells us that self-construction is social: sympathy is always em bodied. B ut in his illustrations, sympathy “does away” w ith bodies in order to produce representations, replacing persons w ith m ental pictures, generalized images o f ease and o f suffering. Sympathy in these scenes takes shape as a constellation o f images in w hich a threat to individual identity is bo th im agined and, theoretically, overcome, w ith the spectator’s identity em erging as an effect o f the sympathetic en-counter itself.17

V ictorian scenes o f sympathy, too, m atch culturally valued identities against identities that, in the p e rio d ’s pervasive econom ic m etaphor, rep-resent respectability’s social and psychic cost. In a social system for w hich

17 “What we find in liberalism is not itself a plan o f political and social action that re-sponds to perceived conditions o f distress or inequity, but rather the represented conjunc-tion o f surplus and distress, the ‘moving spectacle’ contained in the image, for example, o f a man bent double by a pack o f merchandise. The ‘revolution in manners,’ which Burke proclaimed as the most profound o f revolutions witnessed in 1789, is the supplanting o f an ethic o f ‘liberal, plenteous hospitality’ . . . by a liberal attitude— in com m on parlance, a so-cial conscience. W here ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ envisions ‘liberality’ as voluntary charity, ‘The R uined Cottage’ celebrates its spiritualization into voluntary sympathy” (Langan, Romantic Vagrancy, 229-30).

12 Introduction

vam pirism is an apt m etaphor— in the psychic as well as financial econ-om y o f capitalism, one persons rise is tied to ano ther’s fall— the subject w ho seeks confirm ation o f his or her desired image in the external w orld (as Scrooge does in D ickens’s “A Christm as C aro l”) encounters a less- than-pleasing likeness, a figure nevertheless recognized as one o f that sub-je c t’s structuring identifications.18 R a th e r than encountering an idealized im age o f the self (in Lacan s useful term s, the image identified w ith the m irro r’s reflection and affirmed by the dom inant cu ltu re’s gaze), the middle-class or respectable subject encounters his or h er social shadow, the negative im age that respectability necessarily implies— an image that si-m ultaneously invites identification (since a plea for sympathy is itself a claim for identification, a claim for a com m on hum anity) and requires disidentification.19 V ictorian objects o f sympathy thus signify bo th cul-tural value and its absence. For the subject desiring to align h im or herself w ith such value, they represent an insurm ountable distance from it— a dis-tance that manifests itself, in the texts I discuss here, in a fantasy o f the sub-je c t’s death. This scenario imagines the possibility, so vividly illustrated in “A Christm as Carol,” o f being “left o u t” o f the dom inant culture and therefore, as seems to follow, o f life itself. Sympathy w ith particular social figures takes shape in these texts as sympathy for or against— for and against— images o f cultural identity, and the texts themselves project alter-native identities for their central characters in distinct representations— scenes or pictures (such as those w itnessed by D ickens’s Scrooge, W ood’s Isabel Vane, and E lio t’s D aniel D eronda)— w ith w hich these characters identify and in relation to w hich their identities becom e attenuated. These representations display the valued o r devalued identities p roduced by specific cultural narratives.

Indeed, the novels I discuss here frequently emphasize w hat m ight be called an alternative scene o f sympathy: characters situated no t in a dread

18 Elaine Scarry describes the relation between worker and capitalist as a confrontation between embodied and disembodied figures and suggests that, vampiristically, the capital-ist’s absence depends upon the worker’s physicality. See my discussion in Chapter 2. Scarry, The Body in Pain (N ew York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 276.

19 This formulation draws both on Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” and on the Althusserian idea o f interpellation, in which the subject is formed at the moment he responds to a policeman’s “hailing”: “Hey, you there!” Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” in Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (NewYork: Norton, 1977), 1-7; Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.”

Introduction 13

relation to a degraded image bu t in a desiring relation to an idealized one. (H ence the im portance o f Sm ith s expansion o f the te rm “sym pathy” to include observations on sympathizing w ith pleasure: “W h en we consider the condition o f the great, in those delusive colours in w hich the im agi-nation is apt to paint it, it seems to be almost the abstract idea o f a perfect and happy state. It is the very state w hich, in all ou r w aking dreams and idle reveries, we had sketched to ourselves as the final object o f all our de-sires. We feel, therefore, a peculiar sympathy w ith the satisfaction o f those w ho are in it.”)20 These novels tell the story o f a subject s attem pt to em -body the cultural tru th o f a particular idealized identity, often as an alter-native to a degraded image w ith w hich that subject is also identified (as in the examples o f R u th , Daniel D eronda, and D orian Gray). A nd the nature o f that idealization sometimes lies in the subjects capacity for sympathy: in Daniel Deronda, for instance, the idealized character is a liberal subject w hose capaciousness and m obile sensibility obscures his culture s invest-m en t in identities defined in m ore specific term s. In its apparently infinite capaciousness, its aura o f all-inclusiveness, and its apparent vacancy and availability for projection, w hat appears finally as sympathetic identity per se, in these texts, itself becom es an object o f desire.

To the extent, then, that objects o f sympathy are em bedded in (are, in -deed, the products of) cultural narratives— indeed, to the extent that sym-pathy is a cultural narrative (Silvermans “studious avoidance” o f looking, for instance, remains a w ell-know n stance the middle-class subject p re-pares to take w hen sighting the beggar up ahead)— it is no t so m uch the absence o f actual bodies in novels that produces sympathy as it is sympa-thy o r its expectation that produces an effect o f fictionality— a scene— w ith its concom itant displacements in to narrative and representation (for instance, the narrative o f w hether the beggar is deserving o r no t deserv-ing; the question o f how m uch, if anything, to give; the im agining o f the self in the o thers place). T he cultural narratives that constitute sympathy themselves do away w ith the body; indeed, many o f the texts I discuss here literally do away w ith bodies, replacing them w ith pictures or narratives, thereby im plicitly defining identity as cultural im age and fantasy. Silverman s scenario is relevant, then, less for its conclusion than for the fa-m iliarity o f its tropes: for the way in w hich, even as it puts flesh on Sm ith s

20 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 51-52.

14 Introduction

theoretical skeleton (“our b ro ther on the rack”), it remains firm ly w ith in the boundaries he describes. Indeed, read together, Sm ith and Silverman suggest that w hat Sm ith and o ther theorists o f sympathy typically repre-sent as an inability to im agine the self in the o ther’s place may in fact be a resistance to doing so: a response, in the context o f a capitalist econom ics o f identity, to the seemingly endless dem and posed by the spectacle o f those worse o ff than oneself.21

V ictorian fiction assisted its readers in w hat R ichard Sennett has described as “ the constant attem pt [of the n ine teen th -cen tu ry ‘personality’] to for-m ulate w hat it is one feels.”22 In this capacity, V ictorian novels also helped form ulate the ideological m eanings b o rne by em otional response, ch ief am ong w hich were the social images and relations that accum ulated around the te rm “sympathy.” Indeed, the regular recurrence o f the adjec-tive “D ickensian” in tw en tieth-cen tury descriptions o f urban poverty sug-gests that V ictorian novels m ore than any other fo rm (and Dickens m ore than any o ther V ictorian novelist) continue to provide the term s and im -ages o f contem porary sympathetic representation.

In a m odern dispensation structured in part by the V ictorian novel’s ow n structuring and valuing o f interiority, ideologies o f feeling draw their pow er from feeling’s presum ed self-evidence: feeling, ostensibly em erging from the deepest interiority, seems by definition beyond the reach o f so-cial regulation, and its cultural value depends on that inaccessibility. A nd yet feeling’s usefulness as a conduit for ideological m eaning derives from the relation to the visible sign such presum ed inaccessibility defines. For feeling, o f course, depends upon representation: in order to be know n, it must appear; insofar as it is know n, it is constituted by representation. A nd though the ideological pow er o f feeling relies on the idea o f an essence or tru th to w hich language and representation are said to rem ain inadequate, the specific nature o f that pow er becom es visible in the term s o f its rep-

21 Hence the relevance o f Silverman s identification with the supposed rationality o f a government agency, when she feels called upon to find some principle on the basis o f which to distribute money: “I fantasized that my crisis would be solved if I could only find an in-telligent formula for determining w hom I should help ’’(Threshold of the Visible World, 26).

22 Sennett, Fall of Public Man, 152.

Introduction 15

resentation. Feeling is inseparable from the scenes that may seem m erely to provoke it and the signs by means o f w hich it becom es know n.23

In V ictorian fiction and the w ork o f its critics, the te rm “sympathy” has com m only been used to describe an individualistic, affective solution to the problem o f class alienation: the attem pt to am eliorate social differences w ith assurances o f m utual feeling and universal humanity. Such assurances take the fo rm o f attem pts to resolve class differences th rough direct know ledge o f a sufferer’s experience, as in Louisa G radgrind’s visit to S tephen Blackpool in D ickens’s Hard Times or the reconciliation betw een Jo h n B arton and Mr. Carson at the end o f Gaskell’s Mary Barton. In each o f these examples, the perception o f the o ther as a participant in a com -m on hum anity replaces the stock appraisal o f h im or her as a w orker or employer; as Gaskell writes, “T he m ourner before h im was no longer an employer, a being o f another rac e . . . no longer the enemy, the oppressor, bu t a very poor, and desolate old man.”24 W ith its ostensible effacement o f differences and asserted dissolution o f individuals into a com m on h u -manity, sympathy thus form ulated seeks to efface the social and political problems for w hich it is offered as a resolution. A ttem pting to transcend the socioeconom ic or bodily markers that signify difference, it defines as hum an w hat is least subject to the contingencies o f politics. V ictorian identity, so b ound to markers o f class and place, is thus said to yield— in sympathy— to an ideal that redefines its m ost crucial features as m erely contingent.

Sympathy thus conceived grounds the self in the dissolution o f the so-cial, doing away w ith representation in order to reach a com m on ground

23 Visuality in this study may thus be understood as a metaphor for representation and knowledge: what can be known at any given time is what can be seen. For more on this idea, see John Rajchman, “Foucaults Art o f Seeing,” October 44 (1988): 88-117.

24 Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1970), 435. Suchsympathy, and the relevance o f Hard Times in this context, have been discussed recently by Martha Nussbaum in Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon, !995)- For a discussion o f the way the novel o f the 1840s became the novel o f social re-form, see Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen Forties (N ew York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 124: “But in the late eighteen forties, people read novels more than ever; for the novel was now ready and able to absorb and minister to their ‘speculations on reform.’ N o longer does it belong to the world o f indolent languid men on sofas, o f Aesthetic Tea___It belongs to the no-man s-land on the frontier between the two nations.”

16 Introduction

o f feeling— as if the only escape from social difference were in a com m on hum anity attained in dissolution and death. B ut representations o f sympa-thy in V ictorian fiction repeatedly re tu rn to the social differences such scenes discount; in them , sympathy is frequently the m etaphorical currency by means o f w hich identity is constituted and undone. For instance: inso-far as sympathy’s “tru th ” is made manifest in circulation, sympathy threat-ens the foundation o f feeling on w hich individual identity is supposedly based. If, as I have suggested, em otion is subject to interpretation only in -sofar as it manifests itself visibly, sympathy has a special relation to repre-sentation for the Victorians in that it frequently becomes visible in another fo rm o f representation: money. V ictorian charity, w ith its alignm ent o f feel-ing and funds and its emphasis on individual judgm ent, figures bo th sym-pathy and coin in an econom y o f self-regulation in w hich middle-class subjects must evaluate the tru th or falseness o f non-middle-class ones, and an error in judgm ent— such as the investment o f “tru e” feeling in “false” identity— threatens the integrity o f the self doing the giving. Sympathy and charity situate the self in a hydraulic relation w ith o ther selves, in w hich a flow o f funds in one direction represents a drain unless balanced by some— usually m oral— return. T he offer o f sympathy for narrative, as in Andrew Halliday’s encounter w ith the beggar in my discussion o f M ayhew (Chapter 2), recapitulates the capitalist m yth that an exchange o f funds draws on, and constitutes evidence for, the existence o f transcendent value, and it locates that value in hum an feeling and hum an identity. B ut narra-tives m eant to express and em body sympathy’s value display a circular logic whereby the tru th o f an appeal for sympathy can only be validated by fur-ther narrative. Exchanged for narrative, sympathy resembles the fluid, m ul-tiply signifying nature o f m oney itself. A nd the tendency to regard appeals for sympathy as, potentially, nothing m ore than representation reflects the sympathizer’s vulnerability to the same charge: the need to verify the iden-tity o f the sympathetic object suggests that the spectator’s identity is itself fallen and in need o f verification, lapsed from an idealized and naturalized aristocratic past. C oncern w ith the tru th or fraudulence o f a beggar’s ap-peal for sympathy thus registers concern about the legibility o f social iden-tity per se, and in particular about the construction o f middle-class identity as a tenuous balance betw een degraded and idealized cultural images.

T he preceding account applies, perhaps too specifically, to the m an on the street. A nd yet for the contem porary subject w ho is the perceived ob-

Introduction 17

je c t o f charitable appeal, as in Silverm an’s narrative, class may figure m ore prom inently than gender as an identity-defin ing issue. B u t in V ictorian discussions and, frequently, in contem porary critical analyses, sympathy tends to appear explicitly as a w om ans issue.25 A ccording to R uskin , for instance, w om en’s position w ith in the family renders them better at feel-ing than m en. As the centers o f V ictorian domestic life, w om en were ex-pected to defer their ow n desires and w ork tow ard the fulfillm ent o f o thers’, and the nam e given that generalized identification was frequently sympathy. A nd that sympathy, in tu rn , suggested a m ore generalized ca-pacity to identify w ith others, as in this R uskinian account o f imaginative identification: “She is to exercise herself in im agining w hat w ould be the effects upon her m ind and conduct, i f she were daily brough t in to the presence o f the suffering w hich is no t the less real because shut from her sight.”26 In a discussion o f nationalism , Samuel Smiles links sympathy learned in childhood to the adult exercises o f charity and philanthropy: “T he nation comes from the nursery. Public opinion is for the m ost part the ou tgrow th o f the hom e, and the best philanthropy com es from thefireside___From this little central spot, the hum an sympathies may extendin an ever w idening circle, until the w orld is em braced for though true philanthropy, like charity, begins at hom e, assuredly it does n o t end there.”27

T he association o f w om en w ith feeling inform s the representation o f female characters in w hat I call scenes o f sympathy. B ut sympathy is no t uniquely a w o m en ’s issue; rather, V ictorian representations offer com pet-ing and com plim entary structures variously associated w ith sympathy. For bo th male and female characters, sympathy provokes confusion in the signs o f class identity (disguise, disfigurement); for both, sympathy is associated

25 Separate spheres ideology is, o f course, grounded in the representation that wom en are more emotionally adept than men. As Amanda Anderson writes, “Part o f the way the wider cultural discourse redressed the negative moral implications o f self-interestedness was to allocate a redemptive sympathy to the sphere o f private domesticity and to the char-acter o f femininity.” Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 41. For a reading o f the politics o f this con-struction o f the Victorian domestic woman, see Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (N ew York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

26 John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (NewYork: W iley and Sons, 1885), 106.27 Samuel Smiles, Self-Help (London, 1859), 394.

18 Introduction

w ith a fear o f falling (the w om an fears the sexual fall, the m an the eco-nom ic one). These scenes repeatedly project an im age o f sym pathetic identification as a loss o f identity, a dissolution or evacuation o f an essen-tial self that is often identified w ith, and represented as leading to, a loss o f life. B ut the dispensation o f charity, like the handling o f money, is im ag-ined chiefly as a masculine function: the masculine subject, w ho “makes” money, tends in these texts to be conflated w ith the invisible circulation o f m oney itself, w hile w om en, frequently im agined as sym pathy’s objects, tend to becom e indistinguishable from the dom inant culture’s projections o f them .

M y last two chapters suggest another way o f contextualizing the rela-tionship betw een sympathy and gender. B oth D aniel D eronda and D orian Gray are aestheticized types; their availability for sym pathetic iden-tification is figured as a beauty defined by an absence o f physical particu-larity. This absence— a blank receptivity that invites a spectator’s projec-tions— is defined in o ther discussions o f these novels either as fem ininity o r as an effect o f the challenge that same-sex desire poses to norm ative constructions o f heterosexuality.28 Despite the pow er o f m any o f these ar-gum ents, however, their insistence on the p rio rity o f gender labeling masks the question o f fem ininity’s or masculinity’s cultural m eaning— in this case, the way fem ininity is coded as sym pathetic receptivity. D aniel D eronda and D orian Gray may appear to be feminized, that is, precisely because o f the way their representative status makes them available for sympathy. In these novels, as in their cultural contexts, sympathy’s face is a conventionally fem inine one: blank, receptive, and available for fantasy.

T h e figures V ictorian society defined as objects o f sympathy were, o f course, its outcasts; situated outside respectable identity, they w ere es-sential to its definition. Such characters as beggars and fallen w om en cir-

28 For an example o f such a reading o f Daniel Deronda, see Jacob Press, “Same-Sex Unions in M odern Europe: Daniel Deronda, Altneuland, and the Homoerotics o f Jewish Nationalism,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 299-329; on W ilde see Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 181-89.

Introduction 19

culate in these texts as projections o f a fear o f falling em bedded w ith in the structure o f V ictorian middle-class identity; they expose the way in w hich middle-class identity was experienced as a fall from a natural condition o f aristocratic identity in to the representation and dissimulation that the realm o f the social seemed, by contrast, to require. Identification w ith such figures, accom panied by incessant concern about the authenticity o f their identities, registers an identification w ith fallenness and guilt that threat-ens the desired stability and presum ed naturalness o f middle-class identity. T he encounter betw een “w ho one was” and “w ho one w asn’t ” challenges the com placency o f the stable self, theoretically ready to offer sympathy and coin; Bailin’s use o f the past tense captures the tem poral disjunction experienced by a middle-class observer suddenly perceiving in the sym-pathetic object a figure for identity’s contingent, social nature— suddenly perceiving identity as narrative, as fallen. Each sympathetic encounter thus has the effect o f an identity w ith sympathy itself: it is a fall into represen-ta tion .29 V ictorian representations o f sympathy capture the tension b e-tw een an emphasis on sympathy and charity as hum anitarian values, on the one hand, and an uneasy identification w ith sympathy’s visible objects, on the other. Closely tied to a sense o f econom ic w ell-being, sympathy follows a capitalist logic: like m oney it m ust be m eted ou t w ith care lest it— and the identity it represents— dissipate entirely. For the V ictorian m iddle classes, then, the attem pt to im agine the self in the o th er’s place was less an enjoyable theatrical exercise than a rem inder o f identity’s con-tingency. In such efforts, w hat D iana Fuss calls “ the detour th rough the

29 For a similar v iew o f middle-class identity, see Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). Somewhat contradictorily as well, however, the cultural narratives surrounding the beggar in such encounters also figure as intrusions o f the real on the activities o f representation and speculation; the beggar’s ap-peal, which demands the kind o f “active interchange” (Sennett, Fall of Public Man, 27) no longer typical o f urban life, seems momentarily to disrupt the Victorian urban spectator’s detached appropriation o f everything he sees. A request for change requires exchange, and in so doing confronts the man on the street with the misrecognitions and denials involved in the construction o f the respectable self.

Balzac describes the flaneur as able to enjoy a “gastronomy o f the eye” in which “one is open to everything, one rejects nothing a priori from one’s purview, provided one needn’t becom e a participant, enmeshed in a scene” (See Sennett, Fall of Public Man, 27; Brand, Spectator and the City, 42). The beggars appeal “enmeshes” the spectator in a scene, taking away the privilege o f spectatorship.

20 Introduction

other that defines a self”— the swerve along a linear route to identity— threatens to becom e the place in w hich identity gets stuck.30

T he readings that follow locate in V ictorian representations o f sympa-thy a conceptual fluidity that bo th was (and remains today) ideologically useful. R a th e r than fixing a definition o f the term , they seek to elucidate its mechanisms and gestures, scenarios and identifications. Tying specular-ity to econom ics, and to the perception and articulation o f identity, sym-pathy emerges in these readings and in the V ictorian middle-class im agi-nary as a vehicle for the circulation o f effects and identities betw een classes. It expresses resentm ent and desire; it prom pts the exchange o f ob-jects such as gifts, disease, or coin; it sets in m otion or reinforces a belief in its ow n transcendent value as em otional currency; it produces narrative. Indeed, rather than producing truths o f identity, V ictorian representations o f sympathy define identity as sympathetic currency— currency that cir-culates in avowedly fictional fo rm (as in Ruth) as well as in the form o f os-tensibly “ tru e” selves (as in “A Christm as C arol” and Daniel Deronda). In the scenes discussed here, sym pathy’s requisite attenuation o f self provokes narratives about the tru th or falsity o f self-representation; these scenes es-tablish links betw een sympathy, disguise, and deception that call ostensibly

30 Fuss, Identification Papers, 2. Sympathy’s importance as a middle-class realm o f feeling perhaps accounts for the tendency, from Wordsworth to Nussbaum, to align literary rep-resentations o f suffering with imaginative identification itself. In Nussbaum s argument, for instance, what awakens the “literary imagination” is the reader’s perception that “it might have been otherwise” for the sufferer. “W hen we read Hard Times as sympathetic participants, our attention has a special focus. Since the sufferings and anxieties o f the char-acters are among the central bonds between reader and work, our attention is drawn in particular to those characters w ho suffer and fear. Characters w ho are not facing any ad-versity simply do not hook us in as readers; there is no drama in a life in which things are going smoothly.” But anxiety for the character is heightened by the feeling that “it might have been otherwise” for the reader as well. “One way in which the situation o f the poor or oppressed is especially bad is that it might have been otherwise. We see this especially clearly when we see their situation side by side with the rich and prosperous. In this way our thought will naturally turn in the direction o f making the lot o f the worst off more similar to the lot o f the rich and powerful; since we ourselves might be, or become, either o f these two people, we want to raise the floor” (Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, 91). This analy-sis suggests that the apprehension o f suffering may be especially keen in the literary imag-ination precisely because o f the bourgeois sensibility (in Nussbaum’s universalizing lan-guage, “our” sensibility) which finds it “natural” that “drama” should inhere in the reflexivity, the potential reversibility, between the “worse o f f ’ and the “rich and powerful.”

Introduction 21

secure identities in to question. Breaking dow n and confusing social boundaries and identities, they render disguise a figure for sympathy and its projections.

Some o f the texts discussed here— “A Christm as Carol,” Ruth, East Lynne, and Daniel Deronda— issue paradigm atic appeals for sympathy. W orking the borders betw een sympathy and transgression, they attem pt to redeem figures defined as marginal or deviant and in the process com pli-cate the social categories and identities they seek to stabilize. In a scenario rem iniscent o f R e n é G irard’s accounts o f victim sacrifice, figures posi-tioned outside m ainstream V ictorian society— defined, as I suggest above, as that society’s negative image— are transform ed into exemplars o f cul-tural value, em bodying ideals o f universality and inviting the harm onious resolution o f social conflict. T he sympathy and adulation lavished on a few deserving “victims,” in this scenario, displaces attention from the destruc-tive consequences o f industrialization and the rise to pow er o f the middle class. B ut know ledge o f those consequences is not, in fact, erased; rather, sympathy emerges as a circulation o f representations, as these figures dis-solve into the conflicting images they suggest to the middle-class im agi-nation. Gaskell’s R u th , for instance, em bodies the cultural anxieties evoked by the very possibility Gaskell w ished to dramatize: that o f sympathy for the fallen w om an.31

T he first part o f the book establishes a num ber o f connections betw een capitalism and spectatorship in V ictorian representations o f sympathy. B oth “A Christmas C arol” and A rthur C onan D oyle’s “T he M an w ith the Twisted Lip” align sympathetic representation w ith the circulation o f so-cial images. In bo th texts, the sym pathetic exchange— Halliday’s en -counter w ith the beggar, Scrooge s identification w ith his ow n image— il-lustrates a m ore general problem atic o f exchange, in w hich the identities o f beggar and capitalist collapse in to each other. Part II traces the repre-sentation and circulation o f fem inine identity and fem inine sympathy in R uth and East Lynne, exploring the way anxiety about the fallenness o f middle-class identity is projected on to each tex t’s sym pathetic object. H ere, exchanged identity appears as illegitimacy, and, as in C onan Doyle, as disguise: identity disengaged from any naturalizing origin.

31 R ené Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1972).

22 Introduction

In these first tw o parts o f the book, emphasis on econom ic determ ina-tions o f identity suggests similarities betw een V ictorian representations o f sympathy and contem porary ones. In Part III, the topic o f V ictorian sym-pathy intersects w ith, and suggests a lineage for, a different set o f contem -porary identity issues. M y chapters outline a narrative in w hich the self-un-doing visuality o f V ictorian cross-class sympathy gives way, in the latter part o f the century, to explicit images o f similitude: assertions o f mysterious affinities betw een like-m inded individuals.32 This is no t to argue that the nineteen th century saw a fundam ental change in the representation o f sympathy, or that vertical sympathy— the sympathy o f the m iddle- and upper-classes for the poor— disappears from literary representation. M y in -tention is rather to characterize the ideological discourses o f group iden-tity that em erge in the latter half o f the n ineteenth century (such as na-tionalism) as scenes o f sympathy because o f their evocation o f and reliance on generalized and opposing images o f cultural identity, and to suggest that this characterization reveals some o f the limitations of, and contradictions w ithin, liberal claims to universal sympathy In particular, w hat has com e to be know n as identity politics, w hich conceives o f identity as a fo rm o f group identification, reveals the tension betw een the liberal ideal o f un i-versal sympathy and the specificity o f particular identifications.

T he investments o f Daniel Deronda and The Picture o f Dorian Gray in ideals o f sympathetic affinity, I argue, suggest a genealogy o f con tem po-rary identity politics, refocusing that politics as a narrative o f sympathy in w hich identity is organized, on the m odel o f nationalism, as the need to construct, desire, and consent to a particular kind o f self. Sympathy in these novels enables the form ation o f cultural bonds and solidarities on the basis o f a conjoined similarity and desire: these texts describe an ineffable and inexplicable attraction betw een individuals, so that a sympa-thy that m ight challenge identity gives way to (is exchanged for) a sympa-thy that seems unequivocally to affirm it, and sympathy w ith the o ther gives way, explicitly, to w hat in one way or another it has always been: sym-pathy w ith the self—the subject’s attem pt to identify w ith his or her ide-alized image. Yet w hat m ight appear at this stage o f the argum ent as a rev-elation or exposure is in fact m erely another perspective on Adam S m ith’s

32 I owe the formulation “self-undoing visuality” to an anonymous reader for Cornell University Press.

Introduction 23

originary scene: one according to w hich a spectator’s generalized im agi-native possibilities— including the possibility o f sym pathizing w ith “ our bro ther on the rack”— are undercut by the very particularities o f group identity that delim it the bourgeois subject in the first place (defining that subject as, for instance, a national one). T h e image o f the self as a m em ber o f a group thus turns ou t to be the flip side— the political unconscious— o f the scene o f sympathetic exchange.

In these la te-n ine teen th -cen tu ry novels, the m id-V ictorian focus on class shifts to a cultivation o f like-m indedness that presumes to transcend all social boundaries, b u t in fact only transcends some (such as those o f class) in order to enable the establishment o f others (such as those o f na-tionality), and the crucial category is no longer class bu t the even m ore diffuse “sensibility.” Differences ascribed to taste, ostensibly grounded in personal identity and choice rather than in accidents o f birth , enable the assimilation o f individuals into larger, corporate bodies such as nations, or categories o f group identity based, for instance, on sexuality. W hat p ro -duces affinities betw een individuals in these novels, then, is less a spirit o f hum anitarianism than an ineffable and exclusionary determ ination o f like-m indedness. These la te -n ine teen th -cen tu ry scenes o f sympathy, I wish to suggest, bo th participate in and reveal the boundary-draw ing im -plicit in earlier ones: sympathy in V ictorian fiction is always about the construction o f social and cultural identities, about the individual subject’s relation to the group. B u t because la te-n ine teen th -cen tu ry ideologies construct individual identity as a function o f group identity, the pain sym-pathy manifestly relieves, in these later form ulations, is no t that o f physi-cal suffering or class alienation bu t rather that o f a po tential separation from identity itself. In these novels, as in the lives o f m any o f their late- tw en tieth-century readers, identity has becom e a m atter o f national and sexual allegiances w hich must be discovered, declared, and consented to.

P a r t I

Sympathy and the Spi

of Capitalism

I

Sympathy and Spectacle in Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”

In a well-known essay, Sergei Eisenstein describes literature in general and Dickens in particular as cinema’s predecessors because o f their evocation o f visual effects. Literature, Eisenstein writes, provides cinema with “parents and [a] pedigree,. . . a past”; it is “the art o f viewing.” 1 What Eisenstein construes as aesthetic development may be regarded, however, as evidence for what Christian Metz calls a persistent “regime o f percep-tion” in Western culture— one in which appeals to the eye play a significant role in the production and circulation o f ideology.2 An em-phasis on visuality, whether literary or cinematic, promotes spectatorship as a dominant cultural activity. But such an emphasis also reinforces, and thereby naturalizes, forms o f spectatorship already inscribed in the social structures within which particular cultural representations are produced. The idea o f a continuity between literature and film may thus be significant less for what it reveals about the genealogy o f cinema than for

1 Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” in Film Forum (N ew York: Harcourt, 1949), 33.

2 According to Metz, the “regime o f perception” perpetuated by cinema is one for which the spectator has been “ ‘prepared’ by the older arts o f representation (the novel, representational painting, etc.) and by the Aristotelian tradition o f Western art in general.” The Imaginary Signifier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 118-19.

27

28 Sympathy and the Spirit o f Capitalism

w hat it tells about the role o f visuality and its literary evocations in defining, reinforcing, and disseminating some o f W estern culture’s dom i-nant values.

“A Christm as C arol” (1843) is arguably D ickens’s m ost visually evoca-tive text. In its detailed attention to and elaboration o f surfaces, its reliance on contrasts betw een darkness and light, its construction as a series o f scenes (a structure reproduced in the images the spirits exhibit to Scrooge), and particularly its engagem ent w ith a dynam ic o f spectatorial desire, the story is an artifact of, and an exemplary text for understanding, the com m odity culture Guy D ebord term s a “ society o f the spectacle” ; the m echanism o f Scrooge’s conversion is, after all, spectatorship.3 Projecting Scrooge’s identity into past and future, associating spectatorial and consum er desire w ith images o f an idealized self, “A Christmas C arol” elaborates w hat I w ish to argue is the circular relation that obtains b e-tween, on the one hand, spectacular forms o f cultural representation, and, on the other, persons, objects, or scenes invested w ith ideological value and thus already, w ith in their cultural contexts, spectacular. M oreover, an understanding o f the story’s representational effects helps explain the p e-culiar pow er o f spectacle as a vehicle for ideology. For w hile “A Christmas C arol” anatomizes the relationship betw een an individual subject and spectacular culture, it also unfolds as an allegory o f the subject’s relation to culture in general, defined, by Clifford Geertz, as “an imaginative universe w ith in w h ic h . . . acts are signs.”4

A recent revision o f “A Christmas C arol” reproduces the story’s circu-larity. A t the end o f the film “Scrooged” (1988), the character played by Bill Murray, involved in m aking a television version o f D ickens’s story, steps ou t o f television space and into cinem atic space to address the viewer “directly.” T he po in t o f this shift is, o f course, to frame television space as fictional by seeming to move in to a m ore “real” space, and the po in t o f his address is to direct spectators to do the same: to becom e engaged w ith the w orld beyond television. Telling viewers no t to w atch television, M urray s

3 Dickens’s story has long been recognized as an exemplary commodity text for its un-abashed celebration o f excess and consumption, its commercial rendering o f the “Christmas spirit,” and the seemingly infinite adaptability and marketability attested to by its annual reappearance as literary text, public reading, theatrical performance, and film.

4 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (N ew York: Basic Books, 1973), 13.

Sympathy and Spectacle 29

character reinforces, however, the idea that som e m ed ium is needed to send them that message. Implicit in the directive to leave fiction behind and move in to the w orld, in b o th this film and the tex t on w hich it is based, is the claim that the way to the w orld lies through representation.

Presenting Scrooge w ith images o f his past, present, and future lives, D ickenss spectacular text seeks to awaken that characters sympathy and direct it to the w orld beyond representation. As a m odel o f socialization th rough spectatorship, the narrative posits the visual as a means toward re-capturing o ne’s lost or alienated self—and becom ing o n e ’s best self. I f it fails to explain how the process occurs— how sympathy emerges from identification, and identification from spectatorship— it nevertheless asks its readers’ assent to this series o f effects. A nd if, as I argue, Scrooge’s sym-pathetic self emerges from his relation to representation, such is also the im plied effect o f the reader’s relation to the scenes o f “A Christm as Carol,” given the tex t’s explicit analogy betw een Scrooge’s activity and the reader’s (the narrator notes, for example, that Scrooge is as close to the Spirit o f Christm as Past as the narrator is to the reader: “and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow ”).5

M aking visual representation necessary for the production o f individual sympathy and thus, ultimately, to social harmony, D ickens’s text bo th par-ticipates in and reinforces the perceptual regim e to w hich M etz refers. For at stake in the story’s appeal to visuality is no t just the assertion o f a con-nection betw een spectatorship and sympathy bu t a definition o f specta-torship as a means o f access to cultural life. Paul Davis has used the te rm “cu ltu re-tex t” to describe the way the “ C arol” has been rew ritten to reflect particular cultural and historical circum stances.6 I w ish to argue that the story deserves this name, however, because it identifies itself w ith culture: it projects images of, has com e to stand for, and constitutes an ex-em plary narrative o f enculturation into the dom inant values o f its time.

“A Christmas C arol” tells the story o f a V ictorian businessman’s in ter-pellation as the subject o f a phantasm atic com m odity culture in w hich

5 Charles Dickens, “A Christmas Carol,” in The Christmas Books, vol. 1, ed. Michael Slater (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1971), 68. Subsequent references included in text.

6 Paul Davis, The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge (N ew Haven:Yale University Press,1990).

30 Sympathy and the Spirit o f Capitalism

laissez-faire econom ics is happily w edded to natural benevolence. A nd, in a m anner that w ould be appropriate for a general definition o f culture but is especially suited to a spectacular society, the story articulates the relation betw een the subject and culture as a relation betw een the subject and rep-resentation. Scrooge gains access to his form er, feeling self and to a com -m unity w ith w hich that self is in harm ony— and, n o t incidentally, he saves his ow n life— by learning to negotiate the text s field o f visual representa-tions. Cultural “frames” em bedded in the story’s images invite the specta-to r’s identification, collapsing sympathy into an identification w ith repre-sentation itself. M aking participation in its scenes dependent on such identification, the story constitutes b o th its idealized charitable self and the ideal subject o f com m odity culture. “A Christm as C arol” reconciles Christmases Past and Christmases Yet to Com e, that is, by conjuring up an illusion o f presence.

T he story’s ideological project— its attem pt to link sympathy and business by incorporating a charitable impulse in to its readers’ self-conceptions— underlies its association o f charitable feeling w ith participation in cultural life.7 A narrative w hose ostensible purpose is the p roduction o f social sympathy, “A Christm as C aro l” bo th recalls and revises those scenes in eigh teen th -cen tu ry fiction that, depicting encounters betw een charity givers and receivers, m odel sympathy for readers positioned as witnesses.8 A lthough such scenes have an instructional function and were m eant to

7 Despite the importance o f feminine subjectivity to Victorian ideologies o f feeling, “A Christmas Carol” links charity to a masculine-identified form o f power: to the proper functioning o f the economy. Relevant here is Kaja Silverman’s discussion o f the way in which “our dominant fiction calls upon the male subject to see himself, and the female subject to recognize and desire him, only through the mediation o f images o f an unim-paired masculinity.” Male Subjectivity at the Margins (N ew York: Routledge, 1992), 42. Scrooge’s miserliness is by implication a corollary o f his rejection o f female companion-ship and the family; the story presents Scrooge with images o f his own impaired mas-culinity and permits him to restore himself, through gift giving, as a symbolic father to the Cratchit family (“to Tiny Tim, w ho did N O T die, he was a second father” [133-34]).

8 I refer to such novels as Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling and Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey. These scenes are themselves “culture-texts,” in that they stage con-frontations between characters situated in different social contexts and demonstrate em o-tion’s inseparability from social configurations.

Sympathy and Spectacle 31

direct readers from the text to the w orld beyond it, they also posit the ex-istence o f strictly “ literary” feeling; in tended to “ incu lca te . . . hum anity and benevolence,” they nevertheless provided “a course in the develop-m ent o f em otional response, w hose beginning and end are literary.”9 W hat I have described as a certain circularity in representations o f sympa-thy is thus no t new in the n ineteen th cen tu ry B ut from the eighteenth- century novel’s scenes o f sympathy to the spectacles observed by Scrooge, the sympathetic text has bo th w idened its scope and tightened its grasp on the reader; from a display o f v irtue m eant to incite im ita tion and teach ju dgm en t to a relatively select audience, it has m oved to a profound m a-nipulation o f the reader’s visual sense in the form o f—and by means o f— the mass m arketing o f sym pathetic representations. In the “ Carol,” the subject is not the m an o f feeling bu t the m an w ho has forgotten how to feel; in V ictorian England, the potential charity giver no less than the beg-gar requires socialization. N o t simply a representation o f an act o f benev-olence or an exhortation about the pleasures o f sympathy, D ickens’s text situates its readers in the position o f the m an w ithou t feeling in a narra-tive w hose function is to teach h im how to feel, and it constructs them as sympathetic subjects no less than as spectacular ones by m anipulating “vi-sual” effects in a m anner that m irrors Scrooge’s ow n in terpellation th rough spectacle.

T h e story opens on a w orld shrouded in fog that gradually dissolves to reveal Scrooge w orking in his counting house (47). H ere, as in num erous o ther scenes that evoke contrasts betw een darkness and light or in o ther ways emphasize the visual, the story draws attention to its ow n surface and its control over visual techniques (what M etz calls “mechanism s o f de-sire”)— its pow er to let readers, positioned as spectators, see or no t see.10

9 Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (N ew York: Methuen, 1986), 91-93. See also John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

10 See Metz, Imaginary Signifier, 77, for an account o f techniques that emphasize the cam-era’s control over the spectator’s vision. In evoking “the boundary that bars the look,” Metz suggests, the camera eroticizes seeing, in a “veiling-unveiling procedure” that excites the viewer’s desire. This kind o f procedure characterizes Dickens’s writing in passages such as the following: “M eanwhile the fog and darkness thickened so, that people ran about with flaring links, proffering their services to go before horses in carriages, and conduct them on their way. The ancient tower o f a church. . . became invisible___In the main street, at

32 Sympathy and the Spirit o f Capitalism

In doing so, it seems to create spectacle ou t o f a grab bag o f projective or framing devices that it im plicitly describes as the property o f literary texts. B ut w hile suggesting that literature can transform any reality into specta-cle, the story focuses chiefly on objects, persons, and scenes that are already spectacular in V ictorian culture: already invested w ith cultural value and desire. As the story seems to spectacularize the real, that is, it in fact rein-forces the desirability o f a series o f culturally valorized images and con-tributes to a sense that no th ing exists— at least, no th ing w orth looking at— outside those images.

Spectacle depends on a distinction betw een vision and participation, a distance that produces desire in a spectator. T he early parts o f D ickens’s story dramatize the elder Scrooge’s identification w ith images o f his youth and associate the effect o f those images w ith that o f literary texts. T he scenes o f Scrooge’s you th possess an im m ediacy that the Spirit o f Christmas Past underscores by w arning Scrooge against it :“ ‘These are but shadows o f the things that have been,’ said the Ghost, ‘T hey have no con-sciousness o f us’ ” (71). B ut the tex t’s emphasis is on the “reality” o f these “shadows,” and that emphasis is reinforced by an insistence on the reality o f an even m ore rem oved level o f representation: the characters o f Ali Baba and R ob inson Crusoe, products o f the young Scrooge’s im agination, n o t only appear in the first scene but are “w onderfully real and distinct to look at.” A nd their realism seems bo th to produce and to be evidence o f the spectator’s ability to identify w ith representations; exclaim ing about the adventures o f these fictional characters, Scrooge “expendfs] all the earnestness o f his n a tu re . . . in a m ost extraordinary voice betw een laugh-

the corner o f the court, some labourers were repairing the gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier, round which a party o f ragged men and boys were gathered” (52). At stake in this description is less an attempt at mimesis than an evocation o f desire for light (and heat). Other scenes, discussed in the body o f the paper, similarly depend not so much on minute description as on a “strip-tease” effect that fetishizes the visual (Metz, Imaginary Signifier; 77). Dickens resembles numerous other Victorian novelists in his inter-est in the interrelations o f vision and power. For more on this topic see D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1988), and Audrey Jaffe, Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1991). The ability o f “A Christmas Carol” to make readers “see” is fur-ther associated w ith a mechanics o f projection and dynamic o f spectatorial desire that pro-duce in readers a condition o f consumer desire and construct the text as commodity.

Sympathy and Spectacle 3 3

ing and crying,” his face “heightened and excited” (72). Subsequent scenes produced by the spirit similarly evoke desire and com pel identification. T he scene o f Fezziwigs ball takes Scrooge “ou t o f his w its” : “His heart and soul were in the scene, and w ith his form er self” ; he speaks “uncon -sciously like his form er, no t his latter, self” (78). If Scrooge’s relation to the scenes from the Arabian Nights and Robinson Crusoe is analogous to his re-sponse to o ther scenes from his past and bo th are analogous to the reader’s relation to the text o f “A Christmas Carol,” then literature is here im ag-ined as spectacle, and bo th are defined as com pelling identification w hile precluding participation.

A lthough tem poral distance and fictionality separate observer from ob-served in these scenes, the story’s emphasis on the realism o f w hat is seen blurs the difference betw een a spectacularity literature finds and one it cre-ates. Similarly, w hat the spirits choose to represent as “scene” is often, in effect, already one. Davis has described the story’s construction as a series o f scenes in its use o f dream and projection and its allusions to popular V ictorian images. B ut its scenes are also related to w hat M ary A nn D oane calls “scenarios” : constellations o f objects or persons charged w ith cultural significance, they are images o f images displayed to evoke desire in a spec-tator w ho recognizes the values em bedded in them .11 T he scenes o f Scrooge’s boyhood friends, for instance, com pel spectatorial desire through their tem poral distance and through Scrooge’s evident, im m ediate pleasure in apprehending them . Indistinct as they are, however, they serve chiefly to signify youth and boyhood fellowship and to gesture toward an idealized preindustrial w orld in w hich w ork resembles play. In the description o f Fezziwig’s ball, similarly, desire is signaled by absorption, the disappearance o f bo th the spirit and Scrooge while the scene is being described. B ut de-sire is also inscribed in the display o f the dance itself, w ith its stylized em -phasis on couples and courtship. Encoding specific cultural values in vi-sionary scenes, surrounding w ith a golden or rosy light the images that convey them , the story identifies those values w ith light and vision them -selves, and ultimately, as I argue below, w ith w hat it calls “spirit.” 12

11 Davis, Lives and Times, 65-66; Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the iç4o’s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 13-14.

12 The cultural value placed on masculine virility, for instance, is conveyed by the detail that, as the old merchant danced, “a positive light appeared to issue from Fezziwigs calves” (77).

34 Sympathy and the Spirit of Capitalism

Encoded in these scenes, then, are some o f V ictorian culture’s dom i-nant values— youth, boyhood fellowship, heterosexual desire, and familial pleasure— their naturalness asserted by means o f a strategy that identifies seeing w ith desiring. For em bedded in the scenes are screens o f their own: cultural frames that define the contents as desirable. In perhaps the m ost powerful example, a scene after the ball, the narrator models desire, m ov-ing in to the spirit’s position and, imaginatively, in to the scene itself. H e supposes him self one o f several “young brigands” playing a game at the center o f w hich is a young w om an w ho m ight in o ther circumstances, it seems, have been Scrooge’s daughter.

As to measuring her waist in sport, as they did, bold young brood, I couldn’t have done it; I should have expected my arm to have grown round it for a punishment, and never come straight again. And yet I should have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips; to have ques-tioned her, that she might have opened them; to have looked upon the lashes o f her downcast eyes, and never raised a blush; to have let loose waves o f hair,. . . in short, I should have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest licence o f a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its value. (81-82)

T h e m erging o f narrator, spirit, and Scrooge in the speaker’s “ I” is the nar-rative’s characteristic way o f dram atizing the pow er o f its ow n representa-tions. A nd the subject o f the passage— the impossibility o f touching an image w hose status as image provokes the desire to touch (and holds out a promise o f “value”)— m ight itself serve as a definition o f spectacle. B ut this seductiveness is a function no t only o f the im age’s status as represen-tation bu t also o f w hat Laura M ulvey calls the “to-be-looked-at-ness” o f w hat is represented .13 W hat prevents the narrator from touching the w om an’s skin— the “skin” separating spectator from spectacle— defines

13 As Mulvey explains, “In their traditional exhibitionist role w om en are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that it can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 18-19. This effect is what I refer to as circularity: in representing woman, “A Christmas Carol” (and, o f course, not only that text) highlights a figure already coded for visual impact, culturally defined in representational terms.

Sympathy and Spectacle 3 5

bo th the reality o f w hat is seen and the spectacle’s condition as represen-tation; the com bination o f desire and inaccessibility hints, as well, at w om an’s status in the real as representation. By framing the scene as fan-tasy, the text doubles and eroticizes the im age’s spectacular quality It is no t ju st projection that makes the idea o f touch— o f breaking the skin o f rep-resentation— seem faintly transgressive here; w hat is presented is already defined as spectacle in V ictorian culture.

A nd as transgressive. For this im age is also desirable and untouchable because o f the prohibition em bedded in the im agined desire o f the father for his ow n daughter. T he w om ans presence in the dream or fantasy thus echoes and encodes o ther prohibitions against touch, prohibitions m ark-ing gender codes and familial relations. Desire is bo th elicited by these pro-hibitions and inscribed in them ; participating in that desire, observers be-com e com plicit in the scene s cultural dynamics.

A long w ith m ode o f representation and content, tem poral distance gives the images o f Scrooge’s past an inherent spectacularity. B u t w hat the story offers as everyday reality— Christm as Present— possesses the same projective or illusory quality. It is as if, in order to make Scrooge and the story’s readers desire the real, the tex t has to offer no t everyday life bu t rather its image: everyday life polished to a high sheen.

The poulterers’ shops were still half open, and the fruiterers’ were radiant in their glory. There were great round, pot-bellied baskets o f chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats o f jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness o f their growth like Spanish Friars; and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by.. .. There were pears and ap-ples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches o f grapes, made in the shopkeepers’ benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people’s mouths might water gratis as they passed. (89-90)

Figs are “m oist and pulpy,” French plums “blush in m odest tartness” ; there are “N orfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow o f the or-anges and lemons, and, in the great compactness o f their ju icy persons, u r-gently entreating and beseeching to be carried hom e in paper bags and eaten after d inner” (90). These objects carry the same erotic charge as did

36 Sympathy and the Spirit o f Capitalism

the w om an in the gam e-playing scene (and desire is once again m odeled, in the image o f w atering m ouths); they also similarly suggest tem poral dis-tance, w ith the spectator positioned as n o t yet in possession o f w hat he sees. B ut they have these qualities no t because they are fram ed as projec-tions, although they appear in the scenes shown by the Spirit o f Christmas Present, bu t because they are beh ind a screen already in place: the shop window. As in the earlier scene, w hat the text situates w ith in its literary and phantasm atic frames is already culturally framed. Indeed, the idea o f “fram ing” Christm as Present has as its premise the proposition that the real is only desirable— in fact, for Scrooge, only visible— w hen m ade into representation.14

It makes sense, then, that V ictorian England’s m ost im portan t site o f value— the hom e— also appears as image, fram ed by a perception from w ithou t that invests it w ith longing. T here is no difference betw een the frame im posed by the spirit s presence and w hat a passerby in the streets w ould ordinarily see: “As Scrooge and the Spirit w ent along the streets, the brightness o f the roaring fires in kitchens, parlours, and all sorts o f rooms, was wonderful. Here, the flickering o f the blaze showed prepara-tions for a cosy dinner, w ith ho t plates baking through and through before the fire, and deep red curtains, ready to be drawn, to shut ou t cold and darkness___H ere, again, were shadows on the w indow -blind o f guests as-sem bling” (99). T h e representational frames D ickens uses to set fantasy apart from reality— the dynamics that give “A Christmas C arol” its m ythic or fairy-tale quality— turn ou t to be fully operative in the “real” world: for Scrooge and the spirit as they walk through the streets, the w orld is a se-ries o f such frames, o f w indow s and projective screens.

T he reality D ickens re-presents is, thus, already encoded as spectacle; it is “ to -be-looked-a t.” A nd in this way the text, by em phasizing the real quality o f its projections and the projective quality o f w hat it offers at the level o f the real, dissolves any sustainable difference betw een the real and

14 Thomas Richards discusses the way the Great Exhibition synthesized, in the manu-factured commodity, techniques associated with spectacle, such as the play o f light on the object and the imposed distance between spectator and object. But the presence o f these techniques in the “Carol” suggests that both Dickens and the Exhibition drew upon forms o f representation widely present in everyday life, ones influenced perhaps most significantly by the use o f plate glass. See Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

Sympathy and Spectacle 37

the image. S tructuring desire through the im position o f fictionalized pro-jections, on the one hand, and showing that desire is already structured by such everyday frames as w indow s and blinds, on the other, the story effectively dem onstrates that the real already possesses the quality o f image and shadow— if seen from the po in t o f view o f som eone positioned ou t-side it. A nd defining the real as spectacle, the text positions all o f its read-ers outside it. Focusing on objects already fetishized visually (wom en, hom e, and food) and fram ing the already culturally framed, the story defines reality as spectacle— w hat one watches and remains outside of; in -vesting its representational surface w ith desirability, the story turns its read-ers into spectators and positions them outside o f everything. A t Christmas (when, in D ickens’s im agining o f the holiday as in contem porary A m erica’s, the dom inant fiction seems to be the only available reality), the story seems to say, the w orld is an image; moreover, it is an image in w hich spectators must seek to see themselves.15

This imperative to locate the self w ith in the story’s spectacles, associat-ing as it does the representation o f the self w ith the story’s o ther repre-sentations, ultim ately defines sympathy in the “ C aro l” in spectatorial terms: as a relation to representation. Scrooge typically loses him self in the “reality” o f w hat he sees, im itating, for instance, the younger Scrooge s manifest identification. T he story presents his w atching o f these scenes no t only as the production, witnessing, and loss o f self in spectacle (and, anal-ogously, in reading) bu t also as the taking on o f the im age’s desire. B ut the scenes prom pt com passion as well: Scrooge’s identification w ith his for-m er self leads to sympathy for that self, and, in turn , to sympathy w ith o th -ers, and no t only w ith images. “T here was a boy singing a Christmas Carol at my door last night. I should like to have given h im som ething: that’s all,” he says after w itnessing the first scene o f his boyhood self (73). T he nar-rative o f the developm ent o f fellow feeling offered here makes the tw o kinds o f sympathy (identification and compassion) appear to be continu-ous, as if the opening up o f a space betw een the self and its representation produces a general desire to identify, w hich can then be detached from the

15 This collapse o f reality and illusion suggests Jean Baudrillards simulacra. But I am ar-guing not that the commodity form dominates culture, but rather that commodity culture draws its power from its status as an exemplary form o f culture— its identity with culture as a system o f representations.

38 Sympathy and the Spirit o f Capitalism

self and shifted to some o ther identity. Indeed, th roughou t the story the presence o f visual representation is identified w ith the presence o f Scrooge s fo rm er self (the sight o f Fezziwig’s ball renders h im “u n co n -sciously” like his fo rm er self), and representation takes on a nostalgic qual-ity, as w indow s or screens define a tem poral distance betw een observer and observed. T h e scenes o f Scrooge’s past always possess m ore “presence” than he does; the younger Scrooge has a natural ability to identify w ith representations that the older Scrooge recovers as soon as the scenes are presented to him . In several ways, then, the story ties the ability to sympa-thize w ith images to the restoring o f a past self to presence.

Positioning Scrooge as a reader and in terp re ter o f cultural scenes, D ickens’s story recalls G eertz’s definition o f culture as a system o f signs to be read. B ut reading in “A Christm as C arol” also includes an elem ent o f internalization— or m ore precisely w hat Louis Althusser has called in ter-pellation, a process he imagines “along the lines o f the m ost com m onplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ ” In this theoretical street scene, “ the hailed individual will tu rn round. By this m ere one- hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becom es a subject.”16 As Althusser maintains, the individual can respond to the policem an’s hail-ing only if already a subject. A ccording to this narrative, i f Scrooge learns his lessons w ith astonishing quickness, he does so because w hat is repre-sented as learning in fact dem onstrates that in his heart he knows them al-ready. R eading, for the spectator o f the story’s scenes, is staged as the re-covery o f know ledge the reader once possessed.17

Althusser dismisses the apparently tautological structure o f his narrative (the problem that the subject m ust already be a subject in order to re-spond); for the sake o f “convenience and clarity,” he w rites, he has pre-sented in sequential fo rm w hat “in reality” is no t sequential.18 B ut D ickens’s location o f spectatorial desire in the speaking com m odities be-

16 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: N otes toward an Investigation,” in Lenin and Philosophy (N ew York: M onthly Review, 1971), 174.

17 This interpretation offers a solution to what Elliot Gilbert has dubbed “the Scrooge Problem”: “the unconvincing ease and apparent permanence o f Scrooge’s reformation.” Scrooge s “ease” also suggests a projection o f the text’s ideal reader, compelled, as Scrooge is throughout, by the power o f the story’s representations. See Gilbert, “The Ceremony o f Innocence: Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol ” PMLA 90 (1975): 22.

18 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 174.

Sympathy and Spectacle 39

hind the shop w indow suggests that the narrative structure o f Althusser’s example exposes a similar narrativity in the capitalist subject s identity. T he images o f Christmases Past invite Scrooge’s identification and im itation, bu t access to their reality is blocked by their status as representation. T he objects Scrooge sees in the “real” world, however— such as the N orfolk Biffins that ask to be “carried hom e in paper bags”— are conscious o f the spectator, and they explicitly invite participation in the fo rm o f posses-sion. Visual representation inscribes the spectator as absence or lack and, in their fullness, these images em phasize that lack. B u t the relation b e-tw een spectator and image is reversed, as these com m odities call ou t to the spectator to com plete them .

In the scenes o f Christmases Past, Scrooge’s (and by im plication any spectator’s or reader’s) relation to representation is articulated in term s o f absorption and self-loss: to supplem ent his ow n lack, Scrooge desires the presence projected by the image. B ut the images in the w indow are pre-sented as desiring the spectator, now figured as consum er, w hose com -pletion o f the scene depends on recognizing and identifying w ith their desire. Indeed, the logic o f D ickens’s speaking com m odities seems contra-dictory at first. W h en one desires the objects that “speak” to one, the speaking appears to manifest either the external w orld’s acknow ledgm ent o f o n e ’s individuality (as if, w hen a com m odity says, “Hey, you there!” som ething essential about the self is being confirm ed) o r a recognition that the self requires som ething beyond itself to becom e individual or com plete. In fact, this narrative may be said to display the same “conve-n ie n t” logic as A lthusser’s, dem onstrating that the individual w ho b e-comes a subject already is one. B ut the apparent contradiction m ight also be said to elaborate m odern capitalisms construction o f a tem porally diffuse, or narrativized, subject— the kind im plicit in the tem poral division and reconstruction o f Scrooge’s life. For such a subject, that is, only the m om en t o f consum ption offers an illusion o f presence, giving the self that consum es the opportun ity to coincide, phantasmatically, w ith the ideal-ized and tem porally detached self projected in to the object consum ed. In a never-ending narrative o f self-creation and transform ation, that is, com -m odity culture may be said to w ork its effects by m aking its subjects feel incom plete w ith o u t the objects they may purchase to com plete them -selves. T hrough the purchase o f com m odities, spectators becom e present to themselves, expressing an identification w ith representation and per-

40 Sympathy and the Spirit o f Capitalism

haps, like Scrooge, seeking the presence projected in images o f a form er self.19 Sympathy w ith representation, then, links sympathy as compassion w ith the construction o f the subject as spectator and consumer.

D ickens’s speaking com m odities thus literalize and dramatize Scrooge’s im plicit relation to representation th roughou t the story. All the scenes Scrooge is show n “speak” to him , positioning h im as spectator and as de-siring subject. B ut unlike the o ther images he sees, the com m odities p ro-vide h im w ith som ething to do, enabling h im to participate in the circu-lation o f representations the text defines as participation in culture.20

By the tim e Scrooge gets to the third o f the series o f scenes shown to h im by the spirits, he has becom e an accom plished reader. H e knows he should seek some m eaning, as well as his ow n image, in these scenes, and he does so w ith confidence. “Scrooge was at first inclined to be surprised that the Spirit should attach im portance to conversations apparently so trivial; but feeling assured that they must have some hidden purpose, he set him self to consider w hat it was likely to b e ___[NJothing doubting that to w hom so-ever they applied they had some latent m oral for his ow n im provem ent, he resolved to treasure up every w ord he heard, and everything he saw; and especially to observe the shadow o f him self w hen it appeared— H e looked about in that very place for his ow n im age” (113).

19 The scene after the ball similarly imagines a consolidation o f past and present: its fantasy o f “presence” combines “the lightest licence o f the child” with a man’s knowledge o f value.

20 M y interest lies in asserting not that readers have no agency— that the story’s claims are irresistible— but rather that “A Christmas Carol,” like any other text, will interpellate those subjects w ho respond to its call, those for w hom the text compels or affirms belief in the feelings and cultural truths it represents. M y reading thus participates to some ex-tent in the “always already” structure o f Althusser’s narrative. I do not mean to suggest that such readers cannot read otherwise; my own argument, as well as discussions by Teresa de Lauretis and Kaja Silverman about the way considerations o f gender complicate arguments about interpellation, may contribute to such revision. Silverman’s discussion o f Jacques Rancière’s term “dominant fiction,” as a story or image “through which a society figures consensus” (Silverman, Male Subjectivity; 30) helps elucidate the claim I want to make about the “Carol”— that it figures consensus in the process o f identification I outline here. But the best evidence for the story’s success at interpellation is the spectacle o f social cohesion that takes place around its images each December. Those w ho resist the spirit o f the “Carol” and o f the holiday are, after all, nothing but a bunch o f old Scrooges.

Sympathy and Spectacle 41

B ut his image does no t seem to be there; instead there is the shrouded body and a conversation about the profits that can rightfully be m ade from it, given the way the living person had profited from others. “ I see, I see,” says Scrooge, th ink ing he has absorbed the lesson. “T he case o f this u n -happy m an m ight be m y ow n” (117). In a m om ent, however, the thankful distance im plicit in the conventional C hristian form ula for sympathy— “ there but for the grace o f G od”— is exposed by a startlingly literal liter-ary identification: the case o f this unhappy m an is his own. T he scene pro-jec ted by the spirit is now the place in w hich Scrooge doesn’t w ant to identify. T h e text teaches no t only the need to project the self into the consciousnesses o f others but also the potential unpleasantness o f doing so: the desire not to be in the o th e r’s place.

A nd that desire points toward w hat occupies the position o f the real in this text: the images that pose an alternative to the story’s scenes o f cul-tural value. For although the story collapses the difference betw een reality and illusion, tu rn ing bo th into image, the scene o f Scrooge’s death (and indeed all scenes in w hich Scrooge appears as his present-day, undesirable self) signifies the real, pointing as it does toward the end o f the narrative o f Scrooge’s actual life rather than toward the ideal life that will replace it. “Yet to come,” like serial publication, seems to promise plenitude; indeed, D ickens’s text dramatizes w hat M etz calls the ability o f cinematic repre-sentation to construct a spectator w ho bo th identifies w ith an image and feels tem porally distant from it— who, paradoxically identifying w ith his image, can only “catch up w ith h im self at the last m inute.”21 B ut Christmas Yet to C om e projects a g rim scene by contrast w ith the seduc-tive images offered previous to and alongside it. Scrooge is offered the end o f the series, the inevitable consequence o f a life lived outside the repre-sentations presented to h im and to readers as life, or as cultural life— in-deed, as the identification o f the two. “A Christm as C arol” accomplishes its interpellation o f its readers not, finally, by m odeling spectatorship in the person o f Scrooge, bu t rather by identifying culture w ith images and scenes to be absent from w hich is, effectively, no t to exist. Scrooge’s death is a m etaphor for his absence from representation; m ore powerfully, it is a m etaphor for his absence from culture, defined as representation: as a se-ries o f images and structure o f significations in relation to w hich, as he

21 Metz, Imaginary Signifier; 96.

42 Sym pathy and the Spirit o f Capitalism

learns to “read” them , his ow n image takes on m eaning. His death realizes, and teaches h im to fear, the absence from the w orld o f representations he— and we— have been show n.22

D ickens’s text doubles, by framing, the scenes the spirits project or o th -erwise show and o ther kinds o f frames, such as the w indow s o f shops and o f homes. H abituating readers to frames and focusing on the already spec-tacular, it presents the real as a series o f images that exist even in the ab-sence o f any visible p icture-m aking technology. M oving its frames in and ou t o f visibility, the story reproduces the logic o f the relation betw een cul-tural representation and ideology, in w hich frames are sometim es literal— in pictures, literary texts, or m ovie screens— and sometim es appear as an inherent effect on objects and vision. “A Christm as C arol” thus provides an anatom y o f the way in w hich, in a p rin t culture and even m ore em -phatically in a “society o f the spectacle,” cultural values becom e manifest in— and as— a collection o f images. M ore precisely, they becom e a way o f seeing in w hich the real is filtered th rough cultural frames that precede any particular m anifestation o f it. M aking the Christm as spirit visible and presenting visibility as a threat, the story dramatizes the coerciveness in -heren t in a culture’s ability to endow certain artifacts, persons, and activi-ties w ith “presence.” A nd the conversion o f Scrooge’s feeling provides an analogue for the story’s com m odifying power: w hile alluding to the re-covery o f the natural, bo th reveal the absence o f anything outside the frames o f culture.

T he culture from w hich Scrooge has been absent is, o f course, com m od-ity culture; his failure to participate in hum an fellowship is signaled by his

22 Vicki Goldberg discusses the idea o f images as collective culture in an article about the use, in advertising, o f news photographs o f catastrophes. “W hole populations,” she writes, “have the same mental-image files, which constitute a large part o f the com mon culture.” “Images o f Catastrophe as Corporate Ballyhoo,” NewYork Times, 3 May 1992, sec.2, p. 33. Such image repertoires, while obviously increased by the existence o f cinema and television, would exist as soon as and wherever images are circulated. Elizabeth Eisenstein also suggests as much: e.g., The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 37. The identity between culture and a series o f visual images is reinforced by Dickens’s description o f his memories o f Christmas as a series o f images (see Davis, Lives and Times, 66-67).

Sym pathy and Spectacle 43

refusal of, and need to learn, a gift giving defined as the purchase and ex-change o f com m odities.23 T he need for conversion the text stresses and the form Scrooge’s awakening takes resemble w hat T hom as Haskell has described as the social discipline and character m odification effected by m odern capitalism, w hich created the cognitive conditions that made h u - manitarianism (in particular, the abolition o f slavery) possible, conditions such as the developm ent o f conscience and the necessity o f living “partly in the future,” anticipating the long -te rm consequences o f o n e ’s actions. For Haskell, the conditions for hum anitarianism w ere created by the “ lessons” o f the m arket.24

Scrooge lacks, M arley’s ghost inform s him , “ the spirit w ith in h im [that] should walk abroad am ong his fellow-m en, and travel far and w ide” (61). T h e awakening o f this spirit promises h im affective relations w here he previously had none, as well as im proved business prospects. Scrooge’s abil-ity to project in to past and future teaches him , and is concurren t w ith, his ability to project him self into the consciousnesses o f others; bo th skills in -dicate possession o f a spirit that travels far and wide— w hat m ight be called a spirit o f capitalism, a capitalist sensibility.25 T he investm ent that com -m odities require in this text is the same as that w hich spectacle (and liter-ary identification) invite— indeed, compel: each attests to the possession o f a dispersed self capable o f being in several places at once. As the story il-lustrates in an exemplary fashion, the extension o f self required by the h u -m anist ideology o f “A Christm as C arol” also characterizes the capitalist subject’s relationship to representation.

23 Scrooge does participate in the econom ic system; Davis discusses the idea that before his conversion Scrooge promotes a “supply side” econom y (Lives and Times; chap. 7).

24 Thomas Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins o f the Humanitarian Sensibility,” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 551, 560.

25 The serialization o f Scrooge s life (its division into past, present, and future) reflects the link between capitalism, serial publication, and the need for “projection”— living partly in the future— that Haskell defines as necessary to a capitalist sensibility.

Haskell quotes D efoe on the connection between business and metaphorical travel: “Every new voyage the merchant contrives is a project, and ships are sent from port to port, as markets and merchandizes differ, by the help o f strange and universal intelligence; wherein some are so exquisite, so swift, and so exact, that a merchant sitting at home in his counting-house, at once converses with all parts o f the known world” (“An Essay upon Projects”; quoted in Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins o f the Humanitarian Sensibility,” 558).

44 Sym pathy and the Spirit o f Capitalism

D ickens’s tex t draws ou t fu rther im plications o f the connection be-tw een capitalism and the spirit that travels far and wide, implications that reintroduce an idea o f circularity in to an understanding o f capitalism’s projective effects. Like w om en, hom e, and food, the p oo r in D ickens’s text are projections or spectacles o f the already spectacular; fittingly, the images m ost frequently cited as evidence o f the story’s affective pow er are the children displayed by the G host o f Christm as Present, allegorical figures nam ed Ignorance and Want. If, in Haskell’s form ulation, capitalism pro -duces a spirit that travels far and wide, it also creates the distance betw een classes that makes such traveling necessary, incorporating distance into daily life and tu rn ing im m ediate surroundings into allegorical figures or projections.26

T he story’s m ost famous icon, T iny T im , reproduces its econom y o f representation and consum ption. Scrooge’s macabre rem ark that the Cratchits’ Christm as turkey is “ tw ice the size o f T iny T im ” associates such plenitude w ith the object o f sympathy in a m anner that has becom e par-adigmatic for “A Christm as C arol” itself. Exem plifying the feeling that leads to the gift, T iny T im appropriately enough imagines himself, at one point, as sym pathetic spectacle: “he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripp le” (94). C ratch its family dines off the image that has becom e, for D ickens’s text, the em blem o f an inexhaustible fund o f sympathetic capital. A nd the nam e for that capital, here, is “spirit.” T he gift is a visible manifestation o f spirit, o f a reader’s willingness to enter in to and identify w ith the tex t’s circulation o f representations. T hat identification accounts for the story’s apparently limitless capacity for transform ation: capturing the com m odity ’s potential for sympathy, “A Christmas C arol” constitutes itself as an endlessly sympathetic com m od-ity, its variable surface reflecting an unchanging ability to em body readers’ and spectators’ desires.27

26 These images reflect the sense in which, by the time o f Dickens’s story, poverty was a spectacle rather than a visible reality for many members o f the middle and upper classes. See Gareth Stedman Jones’s discussion o f the “separation between classes” in Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (NewYork: Pantheon, I97i),part 3.

27 “A Christmas Carol” is, o f course, concerned with relations between employer and employee— between the businessman and his clerk. But this story o f class relations is mapped onto the symbolic context o f a patriarchal Christian order, and its cross-class

Sympathy and Spectacle 45

In a cultural scenario o f its ow n making, the m arketing o f “A Christmas C arol” consolidates and elaborates upon the tex t’s interweavings o f con-sum erism and sympathy. If vision’s ability to evoke presence serves as a p ri-m ary way o f naturalizing ideological effects in the “ Carol,” the story’s an-nual return may be said to perform the same function by m aking specific feelings and activities, including reading or view ing the story itself, sea-sonal imperatives. T he “Christmas b o o k ” (for the “C arol” initiated a se-ries o f Christmas books) naturalizes literary production, linking text and au thor to holiday and season— a season already bou n d up w ith ideas o f resurrection and eternal presence.28 W ith the m etaphorical deaths and re-births o f Scrooge and T iny T im echoing its annual return , the story asso-ciates the idea o f Christian renewal w ith its ow n form o f production. A nd in a way that fu rther associates natural life w ith textual production, Scrooge’s life— its ending rew ritten by the reader-spectator, w ho thereby becom es his life’s ow ner and producer— displays all the malleability o f the serially published text. Indeed, Scrooge’s exchangeable identity, and the story’s emphasis on Christm as as a tim e w hen identities becom e ex-changeable, may have given bo th Dickens and Christm as new currency by revealing the fungibility o f self and tim e im plicit in bo th Christian con-version and m odern consum er culture.

A capitalist sensibility is perhaps most evident in the story’s external and internal refusals o f temporality: in the identification w ith a tim e o f year that ensures its annual return and the offer— to Scrooge, to its readers or view -ers, and, theoretically, to the poor themselves— o f an endlessly repeatable cycle o f failure and recovery, figured as an alienation from, and reaccep-tance into, an ever-forgiving culture. T he reader-spectator w ho identifies w ith the Christmas spirit identifies w ith a culture in w hich that spirit will

appeal attests to the consensus achieved thereby. The story allegorizes and, in its own terms, ideally effects the inscription o f its readers into Victorian culture’s dominant ideological structures. To the extent that those structures remain the same for contemporary readers and spectators, the story may be said to achieve the same effects. But in that context it also serves as a different kind o f culture-text, successfully representing Victorian England for present-day readers precisely because o f its ability to condense culture into a series o f rep-resentations. “A Christmas Carol” exemplifies the way in which, in a spectacular society, images mediate cultural memory.

28 “We cannot remember when we first knew this story. It is allied in our consciousness to our awareness o f day and night, winter and spring” (Davis, Lives and Times, 238).

always be necessary; the self as image is a renewable self, forever holding out the possibility o f a new ending. Such an interpretation depends no t on the idea that the story has no effect on the external world, bu t only that such an effect is never conceived as an ending; it is, rather, part o f a cycle to w hich the story’s ow n representation— having becom e a part o f the cul-ture it represents— also belongs. For Dickens, the te rm spirit jokingly yet insistently signals the weakness o f the boundary betw een the invisible and the visible— and warns o f the likelihood that the form er will manifest it-self as the latter.29 Thus “A Christmas Carol” returns annually and, m ore often than not, visibly, w ith an emphasis (and a relentlessness) it has itself projected. In the story’s identification w ith Christmas and in the repetition this identification ensures, D ickens’s culture-text prom otes its ow n endless-ness as well as that o f the culture it has helped to create.

29 “A Christmas Carol” was the first, and the most frequently performed, o f Dickens’s public readings. Although the text varied from night to night, the crucial feature o f the readings was reportedly the author’s impersonation o f his characters and his evident identification with the “spirit” o f both book and holiday. See Philip Collins, Charles Dickens: The Public Readings (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 4 -7 .

46 Sym pathy and the Spirit o f Capitalism

Detecting the Beggar: Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry Mayhew, and the Construction of Social Identity

2

“A Christmas C arol” renders visible the connections betw een sympathetic identification and the consum ing subject, show ing how bo th are consolidated in an identification w ith representation. A rthur C onan D oyle’s “T he M an w ith the Twisted Lip” (1891) provides a la te-century unraveling o f that same structure: confusing and confounding the identi-ties o f gentlem an, beggar, and capitalist, the text literalizes the m etaphor o f sympathetic identification as an investm ent o f self in o ther by aligning that identification w ith, and identifying it as, econom ic exchange. In C onan D oyle’s narrative o f mistaken identity, in w hich the discovery is made that the beggar really is a gentlem an, the attenuation o f self required by social sympathy reproduces the structure o f exchange that bo th defines and dis-mantles identity under capitalism.

In “T he M an w ith the Twisted Lip,” Sherlock Holmes is uncharacteristi-cally baffled by the disappearance o f Mr. Neville St. Clair, a w ell-to-do gen- dem an who, for years, while traveling to the City each day ostensibly to look after his interests, has been disguising himself as a beggar nam ed H ugh Boone, having found begging to be less arduous and more profitable than other pro-fessions available to him. Holmes, seemingly relying on his expectation that the case will yield the usual murder victim, advances the idea that St. Clair is

47

dead—-just as Mrs. St. Clair produces a letter she claims was recently w ritten by her husband. W edded to his interpretation— appearing, almost, to desire the death he has theorized— the detective attempts to explain away the clues that suggest St. Clair is still living: St. Clair’s ring, included w ith the letter, “proves nothing,” as “it may have been taken from him ” ; the letter itself may “have been w ritten on M onday and only posted to-day.”1 T he ease w ith w hich Holmes detaches the signs o f St. Clair’s identity from St. Clair, and the fact that it is his job to reattach them, point toward the problematic o f iden-tity the story uncovers: Inspector Bradstreet’s solemn insistence, at the end o f the case, that there be “no more o f H ugh B oone” reflects a determination to eliminate precisely the kind o f instability Holmes here acknowledges. For the possibility that identity can be dissociated from its signs undermines, even as it provokes desire for, the stable categories o f identity bo th detective fiction and H enry M ayhew ’s studies o f the urban poor seek to construct.

Holm es is called to investigate after Mrs. St. Clair, retu rn ing from an ex-cursion in to the City, looks up to see in the w indow o f an op ium den (where St. Clair puts on and off his disguise) w hat appears to be an assault upon her husband, bu t is actually his m anifestation o f surprise at seeing her. T he story describes no t a crim e bu t a disturbance in the social field, a confusion o f social identity, w hich it becom es H olm es’s task to resolve. T hat such a disturbance should appear as a crim e makes sense given the fantasy o f know ledge and social control detective fiction represents: St. C lair’s indeterm inacy— the m obility that allows him to occupy two social spheres at once— disturbs the possibility o f fixing social identity on w hich detective fiction, and H olm es’s cases, rest.2 A nd that indeterm inacy is ex-pressed bo th in St. C lairs ability to transform him self and in the figures betw een w hich he oscillates— the gentlem an and the beggar— w ho were, for the V ictorians, am biguous and som etim es interchangeable entities.

48 Sympathy and the Spirit o f Capitalism

T he scenario w herein a beggar is revealed to be a gentlem an or noblem an in disguise is a familiar one; beh ind “T h e M an w ith the Twisted Lip,” ac-

1 All quotations from “The Man with the Twisted Lip” and other stories have been taken from Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (N ew York: Doubleday, 1930). Titles will be noted in parentheses in the text.

2 The definitive work on this topic is D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1988).

Detecting the Beggar 49

cording to D onald A. R ed m o n d , lies V ictor H u g o ’s Uhomme qui rit, w hich tells o f a noblem an stolen as a child and disfigured, so he w o n ’t be recognized, w ith a scar across the m ou th that makes h im appear to be smil-ing or laughing.3 In the late n ineteen th century, the oppositions and sim-ilarities m obilized by a pairing o f these figures were particularly charged: in the context o f changing ideas about gentlemanliness, for instance, p op -ular ideology had it that a beggar m ight very well be a gentlem an; at the same tim e an increase in financial speculation and unexpected, devastating crashes m ade it appear likely, at least from the gentlem an’s perspective, that a gentlem an m ight someday have to beg. B ut rather than simply place a familiar tale in a new context, C onan D oyle’s story dem onstrates that the new context suggestively expands the problem atic o f identity im plicit in the tale. For even as it does away w ith H ugh Boone, restoring St. Clair to his proper identity, “T he M an w ith the Twisted Lip” dismantles detective fiction’s fantasy o f social control, establishing social identity only to dis-close, simultaneously, the absence o f the identities it seeks to expose.

T he figure o f the finance capitalist confounds the attem pt— central to b o th M ayhew ’s project and C onan D oyle’s— to define identity in relation to w ork .4 T he person o f the finance capitalist remains detached from the system o f p roduction in w hich he participates; w here the laborer m ight suffer “in his existence,” Elaine Scarry writes, the capitalist suffers only “in his money.”5 T h e legalizing o f jo in t-s tock companies in 1844 and the in -stitu tion o f lim ited liability soon after increasingly separated businesses from those w ho invested in them , enabling capital, effectively, to carry on by itself, w ith “no t so m uch as a sign o f the Capitalist to be seen.”6 A nd

3 Donald A. Redm ond, Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Sources (Montreal: M cG ill-Q ueen’s University Press, 1982), 55.

4 Holmes characteristically identifies individuals by their professions: “By a man’s finger-nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boots, by his trouser-knees, by the callousities o f his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt-cuffs— by each o f these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed” {A Study in Scarlet).

5 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1985), 263.6 Leland Jenks, The Migration of British Capital to 1873 (N ew York, 1927); quoted in

Barbara Weiss, The Hell of the English: Bankruptcy and the Victorian Novel (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1986), 139.

50 Sym pathy and the Spirit o f Capitalism

because o f the detachm ent o f “his ow n em bodied psyche, will, and con-sciousness” from the m anner in w hich he produces his incom e, as Scarry puts it, the capitalist m ight well be called an “exem pted person” : “it is that absence o f self, that liberating relation, that attribute o f nonparticipation,” w hich “is sum m arized by the w ord ‘capitalist.’ ”7

Such an exem pted person is Charles D ickens’s Alfred Lammle, who, in place o f the usual markers o f identity and gentlemanliness, has “Shares” :

The mature young gentleman is a person o f property. H e invests his property. He goes, in a condescending amateurish way, into the City, at-tends meetings o f directors, and has to do with traffic in Shares. As is well known to the wise in their generation, traffic in Shares is the one thing to have to do w ith in this world. Have no antecedents, no established character, no cultivation, no ideas, no manners; have Shares. Have Shares enough to be on Boards o f Direction in capital letters, oscillate on mys-terious business between London and Paris, and be great. W here does he come from? Shares. W here is he going to? Shares. W hat are his tastes? Shares. Has he any principles? Shares. W hat squeezes him into Parliament? Shares. Perhaps he never o f himself achieved success in any-thing, never originated anything, never produced anything? Sufficient answer to all; Shares.8

“ Shares” substitute for cultivation, manners, principles, and production, replacing w hat had appeared to be substantive w ith w hat doesn’t appear at all. In Our Mutual Friend, the sinister im plications o f such absence are manifest in Lam m le’s deceitfulness, as well as in the novel’s paradigmatic image o f the bodies Gaffer H exam pulls from the river, devoid o f any dis-tinguishing characteristics bu t for their clothing and the m oney he re-trieves from it. A nd it is in the atm osphere created by the novel’s in ter-tw ining o f finance and identity that Boffin engineers his “pious fraud” ; in such a context, D ickens seems to say, n o t even w ell-in tentioned characters need adhere to any notions novel readers m ight hold o f consistency or legibility.

7 Scarry, Body in Pain, 265.8 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin 1977),

159-60.

Detecting the Beggar 51

T he identity o f the “m an w ho does som ething in the City,” then, seemed as ungrounded as the C ity ’s prosperity itself did to m any n ine teen th - century observers— a perception no doub t enhanced by the frequency w ith w hich, in the second half o f the century, p rom inen t businessmen w ere revealed to have built their empires on foundations o f nonexistent capital.9 (O f the seemingly u nbounded proliferation and circulation o f w ealth in the City, one contem porary observer w rote, “W e find m any thousands w ho live by supplying one ano ther’s wants; and the question arises, w hence comes the original means by w hich such a state o f things is rendered possible? W hat, in fact, is the prim ary fund o f w hich these per-sons manage to secure a share?”)10 In his passivity and detachm ent, in the disinterested relation he bears to his interests, the “m an w ho does som e-th ing in the C ity ” exemplifies the k ind o f fungible identity that, his contem poraries feared, inhabited a realm o f exchange divorced from pro-duction .11

T he m iddle classes in the n ineteen th century regarded the unproductive gentlem an in a dubious light. Since neither he nor the beggar pu t in w hat they regarded as an honest day’s labor, bo th were subject to general suspi-cion— the suspicion, in particular, o f attem pting to deceive those w ho did. A section o f M ayhew ’s London Labour and the London Poor, included under the rubric “Those W h o W ill N o t W ork” and w ritten by A ndrew Halliday, discusses those “beggars and cheats” w ho, although physically sound enough to perfo rm “honest” labor, choose instead to make their livings by deceiving the charitable. This “false beggar,” as M ayhew repre-sents him , is a kind o f actor, taking on specific costumes and m annerism s for the perform ance o f his roles. O f one type o f “street campaigner,” for example, Halliday w rites: “H e is im itative, and in his tim e plays m any parts___His bearing is m ost military; he keeps his neck straight, his chin

9 See Weiss, Hell of the English, chap. 7.10 Francis Sheppard, London, 1808-1870: The Infernal Wen (Berkeley: University o f

California Press, 1971), 81-82.11 O n identity and exchange see Catherine Gallagher, “George Eliot and Daniel

Deronda: The Prostitute and the Jewish Question,” in Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, ed. R uth Bernard Yeazell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 39-62.

i n . . . he is as stiff as an em balm ed preparation, for w hich, bu t for the m o -tion o f his eyes, you m ight mistake him .” 12 A nd in order to see through this deceptive surface, the m an on the street requires H olm esian powers o f detection. In one instance Halliday, in the com pany o f a friend w ho had once been a sailor, comes across w hat appears to h im to be “a brother sailor in distress.” “ O f course you will give h im som ething,” he says to his friend, to w hich rem ark the friend responds negatively: “D id you see h im s p it? . ..A real sailor never spits to w in d ’ard. Why, he could’nt” (415). U nm asking the “false beggar” involves know ing the “tru e ” version o f the character he attem pts to im personate, and it is the purpose o f M ayhew ’s w ork to codify these types, granting the public the ability to distinguish “ tru e” identity from “false.”

Halliday is particularly offended by the figure w hose pose conflates the beggar and the gentlem an. T h e begging-letter w riter, w ho “is the con-necting link betw een m endicity and external respectability,”

affects white cravats, soft hands, and filbert nails. H e oils his hair, cleans his boots, and wears a portentous stick-up collar. The light o f other days o f gentility and comfort casts a halo o f “deportm ent” over his well- brushed, white-seamed coat, his carefully darned black-cloth gloves, andpudgy gaiters__ Among the many varieties o f mendacious beggars,there is none so detestable as this hypocritical scoundrel, who, with an ostentatiously-submissive air, and false pretense o f faded fortunes, tells his plausible tale o f undeserved suffering, and extracts from the pockets o f the superficially good-hearted their sympathy and coin. (403)

For Halliday, the link betw een m endicity and m endacity is m ore than m erely linguistic. B ut w hy should the begging-letter w riter offend m ore than other beggars w ho, through various schemes, deprive the charitable o f their “sympathy and co in”? Halliday s dislike o f this character seems re-lated to his pretense to respectability: the “intuitive know ledge” o f the “nobility and landed gentry” that aids h im in his deceptive practice. T he begging-letter w rite r implies by his behavior that gentlem anliness is

52 Sym pathy and the Spirit o f Capitalism

12 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (N ew York: A. M. Kelley, 1967), 4:418. Subsequent references included in the text.

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merely a m atter o f surfaces, disturbingly suggesting, in his capacity for im -itation, the gentlem an’s ow n imitability.

Such a possibility had already been explored in Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son (1774), in w hich the author tells his readers how to “act” the gen-tleman. “W hen you go into good com pany . . . observe carefully their turn , their manners, their address, and conform your ow n to them . B ut this is no t all, neither; go deeper still; observe their characters, and pry, as far as you can, into bo th their hearts and their heads. Seek for their particular m erit, their predom inant passion, or their prevailing weakness; and you will then know w hat to bait your hook w ith to catch them.” 13 As the general dislike w ith w hich Chesterfield s w ork was received in the eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries demonstrates, the no tion that the gentlem an was imitable touched a particularly sensitive nerve. R o b in G ilm our points ou t that the behavior Chesterfield recom m ends was in fact necessary for social ad-vancem ent in eighteenth-century society. B ut by recom m ending particu-lar forms o f behavior rather than the cultivation o f m oral qualities, Chesterfield showed “how easily civilised behaviour could be reduced to the lowest com m on denom inator,” and revealed “how weak the links be-tw een m anners and morals” m ight be.14 Chesterfield’s advice about “catch-ing” m em bers o f “good com pany” closely resembles M ayhew ’s account o f the begging-letter w rite r’s scheme: bo th the gentlem an, in Chesterfield’s view, and the “false beggar,” in M ayhew ’s, use knowledge o f a group or class to im itate it and to advance themselves by means o f that im itation. B oth figures take dissimulation as their means o f livelihood, cultivating exterior rather than interior; neither works in any sense M ayhew is w illing to call w ork. B oth, therefore, stand outside the w ide realm o f ordinary m iddle- class life, w hich made w ork into a moral imperative and accused bo th the gentlem an and the “false beggar” o f “living off the toil o f others.” 15

Potentially productive individuals no t engaged in productive labor— re-garded, as M ayhew ’s “will n o t w ork” implies, as refusing w ork— not only

13 Quoted in R obin Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London: Allen & U nw in, 1981), 15-17.

14 Gilmour is quoting Sheldon Rothblatt, Tradition and Change in English Liberal Education (London: Faber, 1976), 31; Gilmour, Idea of the Gentleman, 19.

15 H ow Mayhew articulates this for the beggar is described below. Ruskin wrote that “Gentlemen have to learn that it is no part o f their duty or privilege to live on other peo-ple’s toil.” Modern Painters; quoted in Gilmour, Idea of the Gentleman, 7.

offended the age’s emphasis on energy and productivity, bu t they also pre-sented the V ictorians w ith a constant threat o f social unrest. D escribing the Poor Law’s inability to m eet the needs o f those in want, Halliday cites a letter to the Times that expresses this anxiety: “ It is an adm itted and n o -torious fact, that after a fo rtn igh t’s frost the police courts were besieged bythousands w ho professed to be starving___It was the saturnalia if no t o fmendicancy, at least o f destitution. T he police stood aside w hile beggars possessed the thoroughfares__ W e had thought that the race o f sturdy va-grants and valiant beggars was extinct, or at least that they dared no longer show themselves. B ut here they were in open day like the wretches w hich are said to em erge ou t o f darkness on the day o f a revolution” (398). T he N ew Poor Law o f 1834 had as one o f its m ain objectives the separa-tion o f the able-bodied beggar from others w ho could no t raise them -selves ou t o f poverty. M ayhew ’s system o f identification, separating those w ho “cannot w o rk ” from those w ho “will no t w ork,” fulfills the state’s need to bring into the light o f “open day” figures w ho represent a threat before they themselves choose to emerge. A nd it is the function o f M ayhew ’s labor and o f Sherlock H olm es’s, in this story, to pu t bo th the gentlem an and the able-bodied beggar to work.

B ut the anxiety about “false” beggary is also an anxiety about the the-atricality o f the social world: about the potential falseness o f social sur-faces, the susceptibility to m anipulation o f social identity. T he “true beg-gar,” “w ho has no means o f livelihood,” Halliday w rites, “has invariably com m anded the respect and excited the compassion o f his fellow m en.” B ut “ the beggar w hose poverty is n o t real, bu t assumed, is no longer a beg-gar in the true sense o f the word, bu t a cheat and an im postor, and as such he is naturally regarded, no t as an object for compassion, bu t as an enem y o f the state” (393). W hat, however, is a beggar “ in the true sense o f the w ord”? W hat, indeed, is a “false” beggar? For Mayhew, the “false beggar” is n o t just a co rrup ter o f images bu t a co rrup ter o f language: the desire for a “true sense o f the word,” like the desire for a “true beggar,” is a wish for an absolute correspondence betw een sign and referent. A “false beggar” is, m ore precisely, a professional: one w ho knows the code o f beggary and seeks to m anipulate it, to sell a salable identity. B oth “ tru e” and “false” beg-gars deal in images, exchanging identity for coin. T he te rm “false” is im -portant, however, because it m aintains the possibility o f locating “ tru e ” identity: identity no t subject to the vicissitudes o f representation.

54 Sympathy and the Spirit of Capitalism

Detecting the Beggar 55

As part o f the apparatus o f the Poor Law, the concern w ith “tru e” and “false” beggars reflects a desire to locate the tru th o f identity in the body by means o f the separation o f productive from unproductive bodies. (The com m ent m ade by Halliday’s friend— “D id you see h im spit”— defines identity in term s o f the body ’s adaptation to labor.) M ayhew locates the tru th o f the beggar’s identity in the presence or absence o f the potential for production: the “ true beggar” is one w ho cannot, for reasons o f phys-ical disability or illness, w ork. A nd if the unproductive body is true, it fol-lows for M ayhew that the productive body is at least potentially false; the capacity for productive labor w ithou t any sign o f a product suggests that the impulse toward productivity is directed toward the body itself. O n the one hand, a choice o f profession may be regarded as a choice o f identity. But, on the other, the very idea o f choice opens up the possibility o f m ul-tiple identities— an instability that the idea o f an identity divided betw een w ork and hom e attem pts to resolve, as I will discuss later. Productivity poses the threat o f m ultiple identities; for M ayhew, the “false beggar” epit-omizes this problem by m aking the production o f identity a profession in itself.16

B ut the “false beggar” also disturbs because, in his capacity for produc-ing representations, he endangers the identities o f those w ho encounter him . As David M arshall has argued, sympathy— defined as the im agined reproduction o f ano ther’s feeling w ith in an observer’s m ind— is inherently bound up w ith representation and theatricality.” 17 T he beggar may be the focus o f such intense concern about the possibility o f separating “tru e ” identity from “false”— for us as well as for the V ictorians— because his confrontation w ith the potential charity-giver presents an exemplary m o -m ent o f theatricality in social life: a m om en t in w hich, in M arshall’s words, individuals “face each o ther as actors and spectators” (136). A nd that con-frontation involves an exchange no t only o f m oney bu t also o f identity— identity already im plicated in a system o f representation and exchange.

Halliday’s linking o f sympathy and coin im plicitly connects identity w ith exchange: the offer o f m oney acts as a sign that the observer has in -

16 O n individualism and the choice o f a profession, see Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 249.

17 David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1988), 21.

volved his ow n identity— including his belief in his ow n ability to tell “ tru e ” from “false”— in an exchange w ith the beggar’s. Sympathy and coin, themselves w ith in the realm o f representation, are presented as guar-antors o f authenticity in the transaction betw een charity-giver and beg-gar, offering evidence o f the charity-giver’s belief in the tru th o f the beg-gar’s image, as well as in his ability to read that tru th . (H ugh B oone is supported by the public, and tolerated by the police, because they know h im to be a “professional” ; less im portan t than the tru th or falsity o f the beggar’s identity is the com fort they receive from being reassured o f their ability to tell the difference.) W hat happens, then, w hen the observer dis-covers that he has unw ittingly identified w ith a representation? T he cate-gory o f “false beggar” no t only reveals the observer’s failure to read iden-tity correctly, b u t it also reveals sympathy, coin, and identity to be m ere currency: no single one o f these, offered in exchange, can guarantee the authenticity o f the others. T he “false beggar” makes visible a system o f ex-change w herein sympathy, coin, and identity can circulate endlessly, never drawing upon any fund o f tru th .

B ut the “false beggar” also takes advantage o f the exchange betw een him self and the potential charity-giver as exchange. A dam Sm ith argues that w hile sym pathy involves the observer’s p ro jec tion o f h im self in to the sufferer’s situation, it also requires the sufferer w ho desires sympathy to im agine how he w ould appear to a spectator: “As they are constantly considering w hat they themselves w ould feel, i f they actually were the sufferers, so he is as constantly led to im agine in w hat m anner he w ould be affected if he was only one o f the spectators o f his ow n situation.” 18 B o th figures in the “scene o f sympathy,” Marshall w rites, “play the roles o f spectator and spectacle” (173). T h e potential charity -g iver’s pow er in -heres b o th in his ability to give m oney and in his im aginative projection: the form er, in fact, depends up o n the vividness and perceived tru th o f the latter. B u t that pow er is underm ined by the charity -g iver’s suscepti-bility to representation: his im aginative re-creation o f the sufferer’s situ-ation is m atched by the sufferer’s need to im agine w hat will provoke his sympathy. A nd it is this reciprocity that underlies the anxiety about false

18 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 22; quoted in David Marshall, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (N ew York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 172.

56 Sym pathy and the Spirit o f Capitalism

Detecting the Beggar 57

beggary: the “false beggar” endangers the charity-giver’s identity by en -couraging h im to identify w ith a m ere representation. T he fiction o f the “ true beggar” is consolatory, therefore, in its construction o f a figure w ho n o t only will not, bu t cannot, project: a figure seen as no th ing m ore than a vessel for the charity -g iver’s p ro jection . T he “false beggar” and the finance capitalist, then, prove to be no t only exchangeable figures bu t also figures for exchange— figures w hose identities seem to inhere only in representation. A nd w hile M ayhew ’s project w ould p ro tect the observer’s iden tity by establishing the beggar’s, his w ork finally underm ines the safety o f both . Similarly C onan Doyle, in a story n o t only destined for the popular m arket bu t to be sold in railway stations to businessm en com m uting betw een hom e and City, sim ultaneously assures his readers that false identities can be done away w ith and implicates those readers, and himself, in the processes o f exchange that b ring such identities in to being.

Just as M ayhew ’s w ork pits the beggar and the jou rnalist against each other, so too does C onan D oyle’s story associate H olm es and St. C lair through their use o f disguise. In its opening section, W atson and his wife receive a visit from Kate W hitney, w hose husband Ilsa has disappeared for tw o days, and w ho is know n by his wife to be in an opium den in the City. Visiting the den to seek h im out, W atson there encounters Holm es, dis-guised as a regular customer. “H e sat now as absorbed as ever, very thin, very w rinkled , ben t w ith age, an op ium pipe dangling dow n from hisfingers___It took all my self-control to prevent m e from breaking out intoa cry o f astonishm ent. H e had tu rned his back so that none could see him but I. His form had filled out, his w rinkles were gone, the dull eyes had re-gained their fire, and there, sitting by the fire and grinn ing at my surprise, was none o ther than Sherlock Holm es.” Like St. Clair, w hose beggar’s dis-guise originally served h im w hen he was a reporter w riting a series o f ar-ticles on begging, H olm es’s disguise helps h im penetrate the opium den unnoticed. B oth H olm es and St. C lair em ploy disguise in their professions; for both , disguise becom es a m etaphor for profession. T he transform ation undergone in the op ium den has its correlative, in V ictorian life, in the im agined transform ation o f the husband and father w ho disappears mys-teriously into “the C ity” in the m orn ing and returns at n ight to a family

58 Sym pathy and the Spirit o f Capitalism

w hich has no firsthand know ledge o f w hat he does there .19 A nd the idea o f opium , like that o f disguise, allows for a literalization o f and play upon the idea o f transform ation: w here W hitney enters the den a “noble” m an and emerges “pale, haggard, and unkem pt,” St. C lair finds that he “could every m orn ing em erge as a squalid beggar and in the evenings transform [himself] in to a well-dressed m an about town.” As H olm es describes him , even though St. Clair “had no occupation,” his regular departure for and re tu rn from the C ity every day substitute for one, confirm ing his good character: he “was interested in several com panies and w ent into tow n as a rule every m orn ing , retu rn ing by the 5:14 from C annon Street every night.” And, indeed, St. Clair gets along very nicely w ithou t any evidence o f a profession; as he describes his situation, it was possible to continue this activity for years w ithou t anyone’s actually know ing w hat he did during the day: “As I grew richer I grew m ore am bitious, took a house in the country, and eventually m arried, w ithou t anyone having a suspicion as to my real occupation. M y wife knew that I had business in the City. She lit-tle knew w hat.”

In m oving back and forth betw een the City, the opium den, and the St. Clair hom e, the story plays St. C lair’s various identities against one an-other: the figure w ho plies his trade as a beggar in the C ity every day, through the use o f disguise— a painted face, a scar, a shock o f red hair— and skillful acting, “a facility in repartee, w hich im proved by practice, and

19 It is useful here to think o f Florence D om bey’s adventure in the City: having lost, or been lost by, Susan Nipper, Florence finds herself alone, knowing only that she could look for “her father s offices,” and that D om bey and Son was “a great power in the City.” It is here that she encounters Good Mrs. Brown. Dickens registers the strangeness and bewil-derment the City arouses in those w ho never go there. In the following passage, Florence in her anguish is suspected o f “false beggary”: “Tired o f walking, repulsed and pushed about, anxious for her brother and the nurses, terrified by what she had undergone, and the prospect o f encountering her angry father in such an altered state; perplexed and frightened alike by what had passed, and what was passing, and what was yet before her; Florence went upon her weary way with tearful eyes, and once or twice could not help stopping to ease her bursting heart by crying bitterly. But few people noticed her at those times, in the garb she wore: or if they did, believed that she was tutored to excite compas-sion, and passed on.” Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1981), 132. Though “altered state” clearly refers to Florence, it also suggests that Florence might find D om bey “altered” in the city.

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m ade m e quite a recognized character in the City,” versus the dom estic St. Clair, w hose concern about “exposure” manifests itself as concern for his appearance in his childrens eyes:“G od help me, I w ould no t have them ashamed o f their father.” T he alignm ent o f disguise w ith travel into the C ity recalls the V ictorian com m onplace that the husband s and / o r father’s true self could be found only at hom e: that profession was a mask, a false self pu t on during the day b u t gladly relinquished “on the stroke o f seven,” w hen the husband and father becam e “him self” again.20 (“W h en we com e hom e, we lay aside our mask and drop our tools, and are no longer lawyers, sailors, soldiers, statesmen, clergym en, bu t only m en.”)21 B ut while St. C lairs disguise reinforces this no tion o f profession as mask, the story also implies that his true self may be located in his C ity life— a possibility enhanced by his desire to keep that life secret, as well as by the use o f his talents begging allows.

B ut if St. C lair’s true identity is located in the City, in w hat does that identity consist? T he C ity appears here n o t as a place w here the V ictorian husband goes to take on a social role, bu t rather as a place w here he goes to lose one— w here, in the anonym ity o f the financial w orld or the opium den, he can find privacy, freedom from the constraints o f social and famil-ial roles. Mrs. St. C lair’s discovery o f her husband results in w hat looks like an actual crim e— an assault on St. Clair— but it also appears as her viola-tion o f his privacy: she sees h im w hile walking in the City, w here he doesn’t expect her to be.22 (Earlier, another wife acts as spy: Kate W hitney had “ the surest in form ation” that her husband had “m ade use o f an opium den in the farthest east o f the City.”) T he C ity and the op ium den resem-ble each o ther as places w here the usual constructions o f identity can be abandoned, together m ediating and dism antling the opposition betw een C ity and hom e: first, by providing a place w here identity consists o f free-dom from identity— freedom found in exchange, in representation— and,

20 Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance; quoted in Walter H oughton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (N ew Haven:Yale University Press, 1957), 346.

21 James Anthony Froude, The Nemesis of Faith; quoted in Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind, 345.

22 O n surprise as assault, see my “Omniscience in Our Mutual Friend: O n Taking the Reader by Surprise,” in Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1991), 150-66.

second, by im plying that places serve no t as loci o f true or false identity, bu t rather as sw itching points along a path o f m ultiple identities. (W hen Mrs. St. Clair recognizes her husband’s w riting, w hat she recognizes is “His hand w hen he w rote hurriedly. It is very unlike his usual w riting, and yet I know it well.” Identifying this w riting as St. C lair’s because it is unchar-acteristic, she points toward the same fluidity o f identity literalized in her husband’s changing o f places.) T he den resembles the C ity as a place w here identity is replaced by habit— a habit, moreover, o f consum ption associated w ith the loss o f identity. W e have already seen that H olm es, lacking an occupation w ith w hich to identify St. Clair, defines h im by his habits and his finances: St. C lair is “a m an o f tem perate habits,” w hose “w hole d e b ts . . .am oun t to £ 8 8 ios., w hile he has £ 2 2 0 standing to his credit in the Capital and C ounties Bank.” It makes sense, then, that w hen the police search the opium den for his body they find only a coat filled w ith coins— a coat m ore substantial, its pockets w eighted w ith pennies, than the body w hich had inhabited it.

6o Sympathy and the Spirit o f Capitalism

A form er actor, St. Clair uses his skill w ith m akeup to devise the beg-gar’s disguise; as H ugh Boone, he thus resembles one o f M ayhew ’s “false beggars.” B ut his journalistic background— w hich leads h im to pu t on the beggar’s disguise in the first place— connects h im w ith M ayhew as well. Disguised as H ugh Boone, St. C lair expresses his cu ltu re’s ambivalence about the activity o f “ the m an w ho does som ething in the City.” B ut his transform ation also reveals w hat underlies the social scientist /jo u rn a lis t’s project: the sympathy and identification responsible for M ayhew ’s success in collecting and transcribing the stories o f those he interview s in L ondon’s slums also account for St. C lair’s success as “false beggar,” and bo th am ount to a dealing in representation, a selling o f the beggar’s iden-tity. Indeed, by m aking H ugh B oone the beggar and Neville St. Clair the (former) investigative reporter one and the same, C onan Doyle erases the distinction betw een identification and exploitation: to “k now ” the beggar is to trade in his identity, and to trade in his identity is to sell— as bo th M ayhew and St. Clair do— his words. (There is a difference, however: St. Clair finds reporting to be “arduous labor” bu t has no difficulty w ith the labor involved in creating H ugh Boone. In fact, he takes pleasure in his

Detecting the Beggar 6 1

role. “Arduousness,” here, w ould seem to stand for the visibility o f labor, w hich can be perceived as difficult only after having been perceived in the first place. Since labor is only w hat a culture recognizes as labor, the refusal to see that begging involves labor keeps society from having to acknowl-edge its com plicity in the creation o f begging as an activity T he ease w ith w hich St. Clair takes on the identity o f H ugh Boone, and his pleasure in doing so, represent an effacement o f labor that makes it all the m ore nec-essary to pu t the “false beggar” to work.)

A nd yet w hile unm asking the exploitative nature o f M ayhew ’s project, C onan D oyle’s story perform s the same function as M ayhew ’s social sci-ence: in detecting the beggar, and m aking the “false beggar” confess the “ tru th ” o f his identity, it purports to distinguish true identity from false. And, m aintaining the opposition betw een “ tru e” and “false” in the figure o f the beggar, bo th works appear to support the possibility o f doing away w ith the w orld o f representation the “ false beggar” implies. It is this pos-sibility, however, that they also finally underm ine, since b o th M ayhew ’s structure and H olm es’s reproduce the system o f representation they find so troublesome.

In his section on beggary, Halliday describes an encounter w ith a one- arm ed beggar claim ing to be a soldier w ounded in battle. Q uizzing the m an, Halliday catches h im in a factual error and, after accusing h im o f lying, proceeds to offer h im a shilling— and his freedom — in exchange for his true story (418). In initiating and reproducing the business o f the “false beggar”— the trading o f identity, as narrative, for coin— Halliday exposes the ideology underlying M ayhew ’s project: no t the desire to undo the sys-tem o f exchange w herein identity is offered for m oney bu t rather the de-sire to m aintain it, reinstating the hierarchy the beggar’s im posture has upset by reaffirming the social scientist’s position as arbiter o f social iden-tity. T he end o f C onan D oyle’s story, similarly, has St. Clair telling his tale to H olm es and the police in exchange for a guarantee o f confidentiality— a guarantee that will enable him , in spite o f adjurations to the contrary, to keep “H ugh B o o n e” secret from his wife.

T he conclusion o f D oyle’s story revolves around the question o f w hether or no t a crim e has been com m itted. W hat St. Clair m ost fears— “ exposure”— is exactly w hat the case requires, for H olm es discovers the solution to the crim e in one o f the m ost private o f bourgeois spaces: “ In

the bathroom .” St. C lair’s violation o f bourgeois values is represented as dirt; w hat is needed to restore h im — to make h im com e clean— is a sponge and water.

The m an’s face peeled off under the sponge like the bark from a tree. Gone was the coarse brown tint! Gone, too, was the horrid scar which had seamed it across, and the twisted lip which had given the repulsive sneer to his face! A twitch brought away the tangled red hair, and there, sitting up in his bed, was a pale, sad-faced, refined-looking man, black-haired and smooth-skinned, rubbing his eyes and staring about him with sleepy bewilderment. T hen suddenly realizing the exposure, he broke into a scream and threw himself down with his face to the pillow.

H olm es’s washing reveals w hat m ight well be taken, for all its lack o f specificity and interest, as a description o f no one in particular; the pas-sage’s fascination lies w ith w hat it repeatedly invokes as “gone” rather than w ith w hat remains. As in the description o f H olm es in the opium den, the narrative lingers over the m o m en t o f transform ation, the m om en t at w hich identity is revealed to have been— and to be— mistaken. Indeed, those m om ents suggest that the pleasures o f identity (and, for the story’s reader as for St. Clair, o f identification) lie no t in one position or the o ther bu t in the detachm ent from bo th and the possibility o f m ovem ent be-tw een; w hen B o o n e’s face (not mask) peels off, it reveals a m an w hose identity possesses little interest w hen he isn’t being som eone else.

T he suspected crim e— m urder— is found no t to have taken place; w hat did occur was rather w hat H olm es calls an “error.” A nd that error seems to have been in essence a crim e against the family: “You w ould have done bet-ter to have trusted your wife,” advises Holmes. B ut w hat does H olm es m ean here— that, i f St. Clair had confided in his wife, the beggar’s disguise w ould have been acceptable? T hat Mrs. St. Clair, apprised o f her husband’s plans, w ould have acted as the police, and prevented the situation from oc-curring? T h e actual crim e o f begging is regarded very lightly— “W hat was a fine to m e?” M ore serious, it seems, is St. Clair s violation o f the rules o f bourgeois family life: his failure to confide his true identity to his wife.

B ut the story only seems to resolve the problem o f St. Clair s identity by entrusting it to his wife: in fact, w hile retu rn ing her husband to her, H olm es and the police keep their know ledge o f his activity to themselves.

62 Sympathy and the Spirit o f Capitalism

Detecting the Beggar 63

(“ If the police are to hush this th ing up,” says Inspector Bradstreet, “ there m ust be no m ore o f H ugh B o o n e ”) “T he M an w ith the Twisted Lip,” like the Poor Law, seems to resolve the problem o f the indeterm inacy o f social identity by locating identity in the body: a cut on the hand assures us that Boone and St. Clair are the same. B ut it goes a step further, requiring the subject to tell his story, to constitute his identity in (and as) narrative. And, trading the confidentiality St. Clair desires for that story, the police and the detective protect the system they accuse St. Clair o f having perpetuated, reasserting their pow er to control an exchange that will remain, necessar-ily, in the realm o f representation. For, having divested him self o f his m ul-tiple identities at the police station, St. Clair will have to invent another before he gets hom e, thus beginning life again on a foundation o f repre-sentation. R a th e r than determ ining the tru th or falsity o f any particular identity, then, these texts perpetuate a system w herein a subject is free to inhabit the identity designated as acceptable for h im o r her by the au-thorities. (Hence the unresolvable tension betw een fluidity and hierarchy in all these examples: Halliday’s authority, for instance, lies no t in his abil-ity to discern the tru th o f the beggar’s second story bu t in his ability to have the beggar tell it. O nly the storyteller knows w hether the narrative he tells is true, but that know ledge is no t accom panied by power. T he tale told by the beggar, like St. C lair’s w riting— and like the hand that identifies H ugh B oone as St. Clair— may well be m erely “one o f his hands.”) T ruth matters less than the production and m aintenance o f the proper fiction, or rather tru th lies no t in the story bu t in the system o f exchange that re-quires the storyteller to tell it: a system w hich unmasks that man, and then requires h im to unm ask himself, before the police, the detective, the social scientist, the journalist. W hat is understood as stable identity in these works is constituted w ith in and produced by the very system o f exchange M ayhew and C onan D oyle condem n.23

A nd it is that system o f exchange w hich links the “false beggar” to his detractors— Mayhew, C onan Doyle, H olm es, and finally St. C lair h im -self—as versions o f the w riter, no t unlike the begging-letter w riter w hose

23 This supports a definition o f truth offered by M ichel Foucault: “ ‘Truth’ is to be un-derstood as a system o f ordered procedures for the production, regulation, circulation and operation o f statements.” Power / Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (N ew York: Pantheon, 1980), 133.

64 Sympathy and the Spirit o f Capitalism

profession it is to trade stories o f poverty and decline for cash, providing the public w ith an opportun ity to w innow “false” identities from “ tru e” ones by means o f narrative. Since M ayhew (actually Halliday, w ho, appro-priately enough, allowed his professional identity to be subsum ed w ith in M ayhew s) includes him self as a character in his ow n story, he too is im -plicated in the exchange w ith his “false beggars” : he constitutes him self as social scientist at the same m om ent that he constructs the identities o f his subjects. It is m ore characteristic o f the w riter, however, to hide that im -plication, and no w riter is m ore famously effaced behind his creation than C onan D oyle— w ho, as a w orld o f Sherlockiana attests, seems to have cre-ated an actual person rather than a fictional character. A nd, as fictional character, H olm es is also famous for self-effacement: for the skill w ith w hich he projects him self into “ the crim inal m ind” w hile at the same tim e rem aining aloof from it, as if his identity inhered, like the w rite r’s, in n o n -identity: in the ability to project h im self in to the identities o f others. Mayhew, C onan Doyle, St. Clair, and H olm es are all, literally or figuratively, w riters, and the figure o f the “false beggar” is a figure for the w riter, involved in a sympathetic taking on o f identity that is also an act o f self-effacement, placing its instigator in an am bivalent relationship no t only w ith the o ther into w hose identity he projects himself, bu t w ith iden-tity itself, so easily slipped in and ou t of.

B o th M ayhew and C onan D oyle began to w rite ou t o f financial need. Mayhew, in particular, may be said to have deliberately differentiated h im -self from his subjects precisely th rough the act o f w riting about them : the sympathy and identification that enabled his w ork kept away the possibil-ity that he w ould actually occupy the beggar’s place. A nd C onan Doyle discusses his decision to w rite in term s that parallel St. C lair’s decision to beg: “It was in third year [1879] that I first learned that shillings m ight be earnd in o ther ways than by filling phials.”24 (St. Clair says,“You can im ag-ine how hard it was to settle dow n to arduous w ork at -£2 a w eek w hen I knew that I could earn as m uch in a day by sm earing my face w ith a lit-tle paint, laying my cap on the ground, and sitting still.”) U p o n discover-ing that he could make m ore m oney selling stories than as a medical as-

24 Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures (Boston: Little, Brown, 1924), 24.

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sistant, C onan D oyle— like St. C lair— simply exchanged one profession for another, m ore lucrative one. A ccording to at least one critic, however, C onan Doyle felt degraded by the w riting o f mystery stories: S tephen K night maintains that “T he M an w ith the Twisted Lip” expresses C onan D oyles shameful feelings about w riting “vulgar po tbo ilers” rather than the historical novels by means o f w hich he hoped to establish him self as a respectable author. Publishing in the Strand— a magazine sold, appropri-ately enough, in railway stations “ to catch the com m uting w hite-collar m arket”— C onan D oyle felt (according to Knight) that he was taking “profits made in the street from C ity workers.”25

K night s reading depends upon a num ber o f elements— H ugh B oone as “degraded,” mystery-story w riting as an “accidental discovery” w hich sud-denly supplies C onan Doyle w ith large sums o f m oney— that the story, and the biography, do no t necessarily support. But the connection he em pha-sizes between w riting and beggary may be drawn out in a num ber o f ways: in terms, for example, o f the need to appeal to an audience characteristic o f both, or in terms o f the m ovem ent from “filling phials” to “sitting still” that describes C onan D oyle’s progression as well as St. Clair’s— a movement, that is, from m ore to less visible labor. I f C onan Doyle identified w ith his sub-ject, as M ayhew appears to have identified w ith his, bo th suggestively turned that identification to account. A n identification w ith illegitimate produc-tion is legitimated in a form o f production— w riting— that allows for vi-cariousness', for bo th imaginative participation and professional “disinterest.”

O n the one hand, stillness suggests the achievem ent o f gentlem anly re-spectability; on the other, it evokes the degradation and loss o f identity as-sociated w ith the op ium den. T he identity H olm es and the police desire for St. Clair, in contrast, seems to depend upon incessant m ovem ent. A nd yet even as it seems to create such identity, this m ovem ent also dismantles it— and as he transforms contem porary readers o f “T h e M an w ith the Twisted Lip,” com m uting betw een hom e and City, into a mise-en-abîme for his story, C onan D oyle challenges the polarity betw een true and false identities the story seeks to establish. For w hat is the identity o f the m an on the train, reading? C onan D oyle’s story may indeed express an opposi-tion betw een “ tru e” and “false” selves he felt him self to be living: a struc-ture in w hich the true, respectable self feels it necessary to trade on a false

25 Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London, 1980), 70, 98.

66 Sym pathy and the Spirit o f Capitalism

identity in order to survive. A nd yet if H olm es’s creator m aintained, along w ith m any o f his contem poraries, a no tion o f a true self that could be sup-p o rted only at the expense o f participation in the false identities o f the marketplace, this passage betw een high and low culture has the same im -plications as St. C lair’s changes o f identity: in a characteristically V ictorian m ovem ent betw een the poles o f respectability and nonrespectability, the subject m ust continue to strive for the form er because he is always kept from com plete adherence to it by participation in the latter. T he question the story poses is thus not, W hat is identity? bu t rather, W here, at any m o-m ent, is identity? since it illustrates perhaps best o f all the way the idea o f respectability keeps identity in m otion: the way the social self circulates endlessly as it imagines itself nearing the image o f a desired, culturally val-ued self that will finally (and paradoxically) sit still.

T he irresistible continuity betw een “filling phials” and “sitting still” re-calls the opium den, w hich evokes the same images o f passivity and loss o f identity that the figure o f the C ity m an does— and that also surround Holm es. T h e story displays anxiety about labor that appears n o t to be labor, often m ention ing the fact that, w hen w orking, H olm es appears to be doing nothing. B o th H olm es and St, Clair live by their wits; neither is perceived to be w orking w h en he is actually hardest at w ork. T hus Holm es, at w ork on the case,

took off his coat and waistcoat, put on a large blue dressing-gown, and then wandered about the room collecting pillows from his bed and cush-ions from the sofa and armchairs. W ith these he constructed a sort o f Eastern divan, upon which he perched himself cross-legged, w ith an ounce o f shag tobacco and a box o f matches laid out in front of him. In the dim light o f the lamp I saw him sitting there, an old briar pipe be-tween his lips, his eyes fixed vacantly upon the corner o f the ceiling, the blue smoke curling up from him, silent, motionless, w ith the light shin-ing upon his strong-set aquiline features.”

Indeed, H olm es at w ork resembles no th ing so m uch as the habitué o f an opium den. P roducing the solution to the case in a scenario w hich h igh-lights the absence o f visible labor, H olm es resembles the “m an w ho does som ething in the City,” as well as the professional w hose productivity the Victorians could no t easily locate.

Detecting the Beggar 6 j

T he beggar, the finance capitalist, and the detective are unproductive in the same sense in w hich A dam Sm ith found many entertainers and pro-fessionals to be, since they produce no “vendible co m m o d ity . . . for w hich an equal quantity o f labour could afterwards be procured.”26 T he figure w ho professes rather than produces— w hose speech, w riting, or self is his com m odity— blurs the easily readable relationship betw een producer and product, laborer and com m odity; the professional perform s services w hose m erit, at least to som e extent, the client has to take on faith. Having, as H arold Perkin w rites, “a professional interest in disinterest,” the profes-sional also aroused suspicion for his “P rotean” ability to “assume the guise o f any other class at will.”27 It is therefore appropriate that it is in the figure o f the professional as well as by means o f professionals— the detective and the w riter— that, in this story, the beggar and the gentlem an m eet and be-com e indistinguishable from one another.

W h e n W atson first meets Holm es, in A Study in Scarlet, he has difficulty figuring ou t his future com rade’s profession; given w hat H olm es seems to know, it’s no t clear w hat h e ’s suited for. W atson actually draws up a chart, listing such items as “K now ledge o f Literature— N il . . . K now ledge o f C hem istry— Profound,” and, w hen finished, throws it into the fire in de-spair: “ If I can only find w hat the fellow is driving at by reconciling allthese accom plishm ents, and discovering a calling w hich needs them all___I may as well give up the attem pt at once.” W hat is baffling about St. Clair, similarly, is his failure to fit into any obvious profession. B u t H olm es’s pro-fession, o f course, depends upon exactly the k ind o f indeterm inacy he finds inappropriate for St. Clair. H olm es, it has often been po in ted out, is a m odel o f the “gentlem anly amateur,” “relaxed and disinterested.”28 His lack o f specialization is his ch ief asset, since his w ork requires a collection o f arcane bits o f know ledge that w ould no t appear necessary to a m em ber o f any other profession. Yet H olm es does n o t simply accum ulate random

26 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R . H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 1:330.

27 Perkin, The Origins of Modem English Society, 1778-1880 (London: R outledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 260, 253. Perkin is referring here to the new professional class, in the process o f differentiating itself from the older professional class— represented here by W hitney and Watson— and from the capitalist middle class, more directly vulnerable to market fluctuations.

28 Dennis Porter, The Pursuit of Crime (N ew Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 156.

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inform ation: indeed, by his ow n account his m ethods are supremely prac-tical. His theory o f the m ind is based on an analogy w ith m aterial labor: “ I consider that a m an’s m ind is a little like an em pty attic, and you have to stock it w ith such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lum -ber o f every sort that he comes across, so that the know ledge that m ightbe useful to h im gets crow ded o u t___N ow the skillful w orkm an is verycareful indeed as to w hat he takes into his brain-attic. H e will have n o th -ing bu t the tools w hich may help h im in doing his w o rk ” (A Study in Scarlet). In fact, H olm es’s apparently scattered know ledge signals his p ro-fessionalism. W h en W atson m eets him , for instance, he has invented a process for distinguishing bloodstains; he also reveals that he “dabbles w ith poisons a good deal.” T he one elem ent that signals “gentlem anly am ateur” in its apparent lack o f professional value is H olm es’s violin playing. Yet even that, as W atson describes it, is geared no t toward the ordinary p ro-duction o f music as a means o f relaxation, bu t rather toward cogitation: “W h en left to h im self ... he w ould seldom produce any music or attem pt any recognizing air. Leaning back in his arm chair o f an evening, he w ould close his eyes and scrape carelessly at the fiddle w hich was throw n across his knee___W he th e r the music aided these thoughts, o r w hether the play-ing was simply the result o f w h im or fancy, was m ore than I could deter-mine.”

Despite his practicality, however, H olm es maintains an attitude o f gen-tlemanly disinterest; w hile asserting that “ the th e o ries . . . w hich appear to you to be so chimerical, a re . . . so practical that I depend upon them for my bread and cheese,” he also claims that he may get no th ing out o f a case bu t a laugh at the expense o f the inspectors w ho fail to solve it. Asserting his econom ic interest in his w ork almost at the same tim e that he disavows it, H olm es maintains professionalism’s characteristic tension betw een pro-ductivity and unproductivity. T he idea o f the detective as am ateur mystifies, even as it transforms, the idea o f professional labor: his capital, H olm es suggests, is purely intellectual, his w ork a function o f desire and a source o f pleasure rather than a necessity. It makes sense, then, that in “T he M an w ith the Twisted Lip” H olm es confesses to a fascination w ith that o ther professional w ho manifestly enjoys his w ork: “ I have w atched the fellow m ore than once,” he says o f Boone, “before I ever though t o f m ak-ing his professional acquaintance, and have been surprised at the harvest w hich he has reaped in a short time.” In trigued by B o o n e’s apparently

Detecting the Beggar 69

effortless p roduction o f incom e, H olm es boasts, at the end o f the story, that he solved the case merely “by sitting upon five pillows and consum -ing an ounce o f shag.”

From the nonprofessional’s perspective, such effortlessness is only a step away from doing nothing, and professionals are found in the opium den, in this story, because bo th professionalism and opium focus V ictorian anx-ieties about unproductivity. T he op ium den was a fantasy about unpro -ductivity: explicitly citing this threat, the an ti-op ium m ovem ent in the n ineteen th century encouraged the idea that opium represented a partic-ular danger for the w orking classes and raised anxiety about its spread to the m iddle classes; opium , w rote one physician in 1843, rendered “the in -dividual w ho indulges him self in it a worse than useless m em ber o f soci-ety.”29 T he lascar, similarly, was a figure o f “surplus” population associated w ith unproductivity: considered, paradoxically, to be “indo len t” him self— that is, likely to be a “false beggar” (for Mayhew, Asian beggars were figures o f “extraordinary m endacity”)30— this figure also aroused anxiety for his potential to take the place o f English or Irish laborers, thereby pro-ducing unem ploym ent (and “false beggars”) in the native population. In his fictional role as p roprie tor o f the opium den, the lascar is an entrepre-neur o f passivity and unproductivity, his appellation encoding the kind o f inform ation— about “race,” profession, and social position— such labels are m eant to supply.

T he opium den underm ines the possibility that St. C lair’s “ tru e” identity can be located either at hom e or at work; situated betw een the two, the den provides a place for transform ation, for the constitution o f identity in, or as, exchange. B ut the den also suggestively associates opium addiction w ith professional identity. Like disguise, w hich functions th roughout the

29 Anxiety about opium use in the late nineteenth century was associated with theories o f the degeneracy o f the middle class; the anti-opium movement helped spread the belief that “opium smoking was som ehow threatening in its implications for the indigenous pop-ulation.” See Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards, Opium and the People: Opiate Use in Nineteenth-Century England (N ew Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 175,198-99, and pas-sim.

30 See Mayhew, London Labour; 4:423-24; also Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars, and Princes: Indians in Britain 1 7 0 0 - I Ç 4 7 (London: Pluto, 1986).

70 Sym pathy and the Spirit o f Capitalism

story as a m etaphor for profession, op ium transforms appearance. Yet is does so m ore profoundly than disguise: op ium makes W hitney in to “a slave to the d ru g . . . w ith yellow, pasty face, drooping lids, and p inpo in t pupils.” W here disguise points to the existence o f the authentic identity underlying it, evoking an easy m ovem ent betw een true and false, W hitn ey ’s slavishness implies an inability to move back and forth— a fixedness and loss o f identity. Indeed, w hile the story invites us to im agine disguise, profession, w riting, and, here, reading (W hitney begins his opium addiction in deliberate im itation o f D eQ uincey) as analogous m ovements in and ou t o f identity, the idea o f op ium addiction deconstructs that m ovem ent, suggesting that the individual in m otion may becom e stuck, no t in one identity or another, bu t in that very detachm ent from identity figured here b o th in the addict’s stillness and the C ity m an ’s incessant m ovem ent. A lthough the professional, or the C ity m an, fancies him self m oving freely betw een identities, his very m ovem ent registers his enslave-m ent. W h itn ey ’s addiction— the presence o f w hich disturbs the story’s regular m ovem ent betw een suburb and C ity— thus represents the o ther side o f the coin on w hose face St. Clair and, preeminently, H olm es enact the pleasures o f disguise. A nd in fact w hen the police and H olm es require St. Clair to remain, visibly, in circulation, they insist upon exactly the kind o f detachm ent from self that makes St. C lair in to the en trepreneur o f identities they accuse h im o f being. T h e professional, W hitn ey ’s addiction implies, is addicted no t to one identity or another bu t rather to the de-tachm ent from self bo th opium , and profession, imply.

B ut the story establishes a difference betw een W hitney and St. Clair, on the one hand, and H olm es on the other. H olm es famously has no private life, only a bohem ianism that dramatizes the absence o f one; the uncover-ing o f his “ tru e” identity in the opium den requires no scrubbing bu t only, apparently, an act o f will, a change o f m ood— or merely, on W atson’s part, a slight change o f perception. “His form had filled out, his wrinkles were gone, the dull eyes had regained their fire.” H olm es “is” his professional identity: in him , enslavement to profession is disguised as the discovery o f identity th rough it. (W hen, in the same scene, he remarks, “ I suppose, W atson ,. . . that you im agine that I have added opium sm oking to cocaine injections,” H olm es emphasizes the bohem ianism that seems to draw h im away from his profession bu t in fact registers the absence, in his life, o f any-th ing else.) D edicated to a profession he h im self has invented, and o f

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w hich he is the only m em ber (“ I suppose I am the only one in the world. I’m a consulting detective” ; A Study in Scarlet), H olm es is a fantasy o f pro-fessionalism as unalienated labor: o f the highly specialized professional as a figure for w h o m slavery cannot be an issue because his w ork so com -pletely fulfills his nature, because his w ork is the com plete expression o f his nature. (Just as w riting provides C onan Doyle w ith an alternative to medicine, so too is H olm es’s professionalism contrasted here w ith the doc-to ring o f W hitney and Watson.) His w ork, in fact, is no w ork at all, bu t rather— as the n igh tlong sm oking session suggests— habit: “From long habit the train o f thoughts ran so swiftly through my m ind that I arrived at the conclusion w ithou t being conscious o f in term ediate steps” (A Study in Scarlet). In the figure o f Holm es, addiction is the same as fulfillment; for him , losing the self in o n e ’s w ork is the same as finding the self in it.

Yet this fantasy o f professional identity exists alongside, and depends upon the production of, everyone else’s divided self; it is purchased at the expense o f those w ho, im agining that they can wear one identity in pub-lic and preserve another, secretly, for themselves, provide their culture w ith the reassurance about identity it desires (W ilde’s Picture o f Dorian Gray ar-ticulates another version o f this fantasy). B oth W hitney and St. Clair b e-com e objects o f official scrutiny, it is im portan t to recall, n o t w hen they begin leading double lives but w h en they cease to do so; the police and H olm es require them n o t to abandon their double lives bu t to lead them in plain sight— and, above all, to keep moving. For W h itn ey ’s and St. C lair’s cessations o f m ovem ent reveal that the double life functions for them , and for V ictorian culture, in the same way that disguise does for Holmes: it preserves the fiction o f an authentic self. A nd that may be w hat H olm es— and B oone— are smiling about.

H aving revealed this secret, however, the story m ust conceal it once again, if only to provide H olm es w ith som ething to do. For the detective’s business is to find the strange in the com m onplace: life, he claims, “is infinitely stranger than anything the m ind o f m an could invent” (“A Case o f Iden tity”). In “T h e M an w ith the Twisted L ip” he is m om entarily baffled by w hat has proven to be no t so com m onplace: St. C lair’s choice o f profession. T he po in t o f the case is therefore to re tu rn St. C lair the beg-gar— and St. C lair the gentlem an— to the ordinary, middle-class world o f w ork and family: the w orld that stands still w hile H olm es moves about, and that provides the identities into w hich he will, temporarily, disappear.

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Thus assured that the ordinary w orld’s lack o f ordinariness will rem ain se-cret— until, that is, he discovers it once again— H olm es produces the com -m onplace w orld on w hich he depends for his labor, and clears the way for his ow n practice.

There, sitting by the fire and grinning at my surprise, was none other than Sherlock Holmes.

T he tw isted lip is suggestively no t quite a smile. As scar or deformity, it elicits sympathy even as it mocks those w ho are persuaded by it; bo th sub-servient smile and m enacing grimace, it takes away w ith one half w hat it offers w ith the other.31 As scar, the lip may be said to refer no t only to the disability that w ould make physical labor impossible bu t to the body o f the w orker altered by such labor; B oone may thus be said to return to the arena o f com m erce the figure o f the producer that has disappeared from it.32 B ut w hat is retu rned is simulacra and spectacle: no longer seen in its productive capacity, no longer associated w ith objects produced, the w orker’s body, as B oone m etaphorically represents it, appears only as som ething im m ediately transform ed into money.

A nd yet as w ound or deform ity the tw isted lip w ould n o t have prohib-ited the perform ance o f physical labor. T he lip is no t a disability but rather the sign o f one, alluding not so m uch to physical injury as to a know ledge o f the codes that represent it. It is, above all, a know ing smile, providing another link betw een H olm es and B oone: Holm es, we have seen, will take on a case requiring as paym ent only a laugh at those w ho have failed to solve it. G lenn W. M ost has in terpreted the detective’s smile as an ac-know ledgm ent o f power: “This is the smile o f w isdom , com placent in the superiority o f its ow n pow er and tolerant o f the weakness o f m ere hu -

31 The connection between smiling and aggression is more fully developed in this char-acter’s latest manifestation (by way o f the 1927 film The Man Who Laughs): the Joker in Batman. See Benedict Nightingale, “Batman Prowls a Gothic Drawn from the Absurd,” NewYork Times, 16 June 1989, sec. 2, p. 16.

32 Elaine Scarry describes the relation between worker and capitalist as a confrontation between embodied and disembodied figures and suggests that, vampiristically, the capital-ist’s absence depends on the worker’s physicality. Body in Pain, 276.

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manity; the detective adopts it in the m om en t w h en he has understood som ething that no one else has.”33

If the smiling detective understands som ething no one else does, w hat does the m an w ith the twisted lip understand? Giving St. Clair the detec-tive’s freedom o f disguise and fluidity o f identity, C onan Doyle makes the beggar’s smile detachable, preserving that realm o f nonidentity for his de-tective by enabling H olm es to rem ove it from — by w ip ing it off—St. C lair’s face.

33 Glenn W. Most, “The Hippocratic Smile: John le Carré and the Traditions o f the Detective Novel,” in The Poetics of Murder, ed. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe (N ew York: Harcourt Jovanovich, 1983), 343.

P a r t II

Fear o f Falling

http://taylorandfrancis.com

3Under Cover: Sympathy and Ressentiment in GaskelVs Ruth

U nder the cover o f sympathy with the dismissed labourers, Mr. Preston indulged his own private pique very pleasantly.

— Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters

E liz a b e th Gaskell’s goal in Ruth (1853) was to elicit sympathy for the figure o f the fallen w om an by means o f the detailed representation o f an individual case.Yet as many readers have noted, the novel takes an am -bivalent approach to the category and the character w ith w hich it is m ost concerned. C ritical o f the social barriers that w ould place R u th outside respectable society, Gaskell at the same tim e devised a heroine w ho is nat-urally good— indeed, one w hose innocence borders on (and is figured as) an “unconsciousness” o f the social norm s she violates. R u th ’s claim on readerly sympathy thus seems to derive less from a critique o f the idea o f fallenness than from her status as no t truly fallen. A nd yet, as if doubting her hero ine’s virtue, Gaskell requires R u th to redeem herself. T he novel remains unable to reconcile her supposed innocence w ith her deviation from it, and— as if to escape all the confusion— she dies at its end .1

1 For a useful review o f Ruth criticism, see Elizabeth Helsinger, R obin Sheets, and William Veeder, eds., The Woman Question (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1983),

77

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Criticism o f the novel has, understandably, been unable to leave the sub-je c t o f the fallen w om an behind. B ut in addition to being concerned w ith the fate o f fallen w om en, Ruth expresses Gaskell s general interest in sym-pathy as a solution to divisive social problems; in Mary Barton and North and South, for instance, individual sympathy is her solution to class conflict. Ruth, however, enacts a dram a o f identity transform ation that expresses and reenacts the tensions sympathy is m eant to resolve. Offered as the rep-resentative o f a social category— a type— R u th exemplifies the way the sympathetic object no t only represents bu t dissolves into a generalized so-cial identity; like D aniel D eronda, as character she is inseparable from the im agining o f a social type and the attem pted resolution o f a social p rob-lem. W hat follows is that the sympathy she is m eant to elicit— sympathy for the fallen w om an— takes a fo rm that expresses the social anxieties o f those in a position to feel “for” her: those m em bers o f the middle class for w hom she em bodies an ever-present fear o f falling.

A ccording to som e critics, sympathy was Gaskell’s ow n “cover story,” the fiction that enabled her to w rite— as, disavowing a conventionally masculine know ledge o f fact, she claimed the conventionally fem inine au-thority o f feeling.2 Ruth too, in one o f fiction’s m ost peculiar sympathetic gestures, also figures sympathy as cover: the novel’s p lot concerns the way in w hich the Bensons— a m inister and his sister, w ho sympathize w ith R u th and take her into their hom e— invent a false identity for her, osten-sibly to shield her from censure. R u th becom es know n as the respectable w idow M rs. D enbigh, and her eventual exposure causes outrage in the com m unity and especially in M r. Bradshaw, the wealthy m anufacturer and stern Puritan w ho has em ployed her as a governess.

T hat sympathy should manifest itself as disguise brings out, not least, the way bo th involve an imaginative transgression o f the boundaries o f social

3:113-22. Angus Easson discusses the protestations that make Gaskell seem unconvinced o f R uth’s innocence in Elizabeth Gaskell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).

2 Terry Lovell writes that Gaskell claimed “the right to speak not from knowledge o f ‘the facts’ but from an identification with the feelings o f an oppressed and suffering work-force.” Consuming Fictions (London: Verso, 1987), 87. See also Hilary Schor, Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel (N ew York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 21-22. The phrase “cover story” comes from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (N ew Haven:Yale University Press, 1979), chap. 5.

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identity. It suggests, in ways I will develop further in this chapter, the sym-pathetic object s status as a figure for imaginative appropriation, enlisted in the construction o f a spectator’s identity. And, most prominently, the deceit shifts the novel’s focus from R u th ’s fall to the Bensons’ lie, pointing toward w hat becomes the novels insistent concern: the inability o f its middle-class characters to sustain their ow n tenuously constructed identities. Focusing n o t on the alleged crim e but on the cover-up— creating transgression, in effect, w here she insists none had existed before— Gaskell subordinates R u th ’s situation to (and makes it appear no less than a displacement of) the situations o f those m em bers o f the com m unity for w h o m identity itself seems fundamentally little m ore than a form o f covering up. T he com m on critical view o f the novel’s ambivalence— that Gaskell attem pted to con-struct an innocent character bu t could no t escape her belief in that charac-te r’s sexual guilt— may thus be expanded to include the way sexuality in Ruth becom es a figure, and cover, for issues o f class identity. Like the Bensons, Gaskell attempts to protect R u th ’s identity by distracting atten-tion from it, m oving away from the idea o f sexual transgression as if to m it-igate it by creating another kind o f transgression on w hich to focus. B ut the m ovem ent away from sexuality produces more, rather than less, trans- gressive energy, as Gaskell’s attem pt to elicit sympathy for the fallen w om an becom es a story about the the fallen identity o f the V ictorian middle class.3

R u th is only one o f many divided and uneasy characters in the novel. T hurstan Benson and his sister Faith are at odds w ith the conventional so-ciety dom inated by the wealthy m anufacturer Bradshaw, w ho patronizes them ; the brother, in particular, suffers from a vague em otional distress that ultim ately takes shape as a struggle o f conscience over his role in the de-ceit. Bradshaw, w ho expresses his ow n status anxiety in his treatm ent o f the Bensons, has a troubled conscience as well: em barked on a scheme to bribe voters to elect his candidate for Parliament (the candidate, D onne, is

3 M y use o f the term “transgression” draws upon the work o f Peter Stallybrass and Allon W hite, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969). The fallen woman is, o f course, traditionally regarded as a site o f dangerous feeling, particularly feeling perceived as disruptive to the family. Susan Staves argues that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “seduced maiden” novels express anxiety about what Lawrence Stone has termed “affective individualism”: the shift from an assumed traditional, patriarchal con-tinuity and familial order to an emphasis on individual will and desire. Staves, “British Seduced Maidens,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 14 (1980-81): 109-34.

8o Fear of Falling

the form er Bellingham, R u th s seducer), he warns him self to take care that “the slack-principled Mr. Bradshaw o f one m o n th o f ferm ent and ex-citem ent, m ight no t be confounded w ith the highly conscientious and deeply-religious M r. Bradshaw, w ho w en t to chapel tw ice a day.”4 Farquhar, the m an Bradshaw s daughter Jem im a is to marry, seems to R u th to possess “ two characters” : “the old o n e . . . a m an acting up to a high stan-dard o f lofty p rin c ip le ,. . . [and] the new o n e . . . cold and calculating in all he d id” (228). A nd Jem im a herself is caught betw een “awe” at her father and a desire to follow her ow n “passionate impulses” (211).

Bradshaws relationship to D onne suggests an underlying cause for this nearly universal condition o f self-division. T he politician s aristocratic m an-ner makes Bradshaw aware o f the “incontestable difference o f rank and stan-dard that there was, in every respect, between his guest and his ow n fam-ily. . . . It was som ething indescribable— a quiet being at ease, and expecting every one else to be so— an attention to w om en, w hich was so habitual as to be unconsciously exercised. . . a happy choice o f simple and expressive words” (261-62).“In fact,” it seems to Bradshaw,“Mr. D onne had been born and cradled in all that wealth could purchase, and so had his ancestors be-fore him for so many generations, that refinem ent and luxury seemed the natural condition o f man, and they that dwelt w ithout were in the position o f m onsters” (265). T he difference betw een D onne and Bradshaw, as the latter sees it, is one o f consciousness versus unconsciousness, the natural ver-sus the forced (“His m ode o f living, though strained to a high pitch just at this tim e .. . was no m ore than Mr. D onne was accustomed to every day o f his life” [265]), and aristocratic identity versus “m onstrous” and self-con- scious self creation. Indeed, Bradshaw s “straining,” his moral and econom ic uneasiness, is only one example o f a m oral and econom ic discontent that affects almost all the novels characters: an awareness o f and uneasiness about identity constructed and anxiously maintained rather than assumed as nat-ural. In particular, the novels characters are torm ented by the way in w hich a rigid adherence to the conventions o f middle-class behavior inevitably gives way to a determ ination to deviate from those conventions.5

4 Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth (N ew York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 307. Subsequent references included in text.

5 See John Kucich, The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), for a discussion o f the role o f transgression in the formation o f Victorian middle-class identity.

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If the character o f R u th has traditionally been regarded as the occasion for an impulse that leads the Bensons outside conventional m oral bound-aries, then, she may also be seen as the fo rm such an impulse takes. A so-cial outcast— requiring, as Faith B enson decides, a new identity— R u th provides the Bensons w ith a blank slate on w hich to w rite. A nd w hat they w rite projects bo th a desire for natural identity (which here, as in D o n n e’s case, manifests itself in aristocratic form : “she m ight be a Percy or a H ow ard for the grandeur o f her grace!” thinks D o n n e / Bellingham [278]), and an identity constructed as a tension betw een an illicit self and its respectable cover. “Mrs. D enbigh,” that is, em bodies the problem Gaskell raises for all R uth’s characters. H overing betw een a transgressive- ness defined in term s o f bo th sexuality and class and a respectability pre-sented as bo th natural and artificial, R u th em bodies anxieties constitutive o f V ictorian middle-class identity: the fear that respectability is a mas-querade, that the individual self is already and inevitably fallen— that, as Peter Stallybrass and A llon W hite have pu t it, in the construction o f bou r-geois identity, an “underground self” has “ the upper hand.” In Ruth, bo th middle-class identity and the fallen w om an take shape in a tension be-tw een w hat M arjorie Levinson has called “the m ythologically antagonis-tic upper and lower classes,” and Stallybrass and W hite have described as the opposition betw een “high” and “low ” central to the construction o f bourgeois identity in the n ineteen th century.6

R u th ’s divided identity also serves as a conduit for a feeling the novel associates im plicitly w ith sympathy: ressentiment. Like a num ber o f Gaskell’s heroines, and like Gaskell herself, the Bensons fictionalize in the nam e o f sympathy. B ut w hen Bradshaw, taken in by R u th ’s disguise, takes her into his hom e, the Bensons’ lie implicates them in an act o f aggression against their wealthy neighbor. D isrupting and confusing social b o u n d -aries in their transform ation o f R u th ’s identity, and dem onstrating the ease w ith w hich a w om an from one social background may blend in w ith an-other, the Bensons— and Gaskell— play on com m onplace V ictorian anx-ieties about the fallen w om an’s ability to rise in society, in particular her ability to penetrate the protected boundaries o f the bourgeois household. T he use to w hich the fiction o f R u th ’s identity is put, as well as the u r-

6 Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 176-77; Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 5.

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gency o f the Bensons’ desire to erase its alienating effects once it is dis-covered, recall M ax Scheler’s description o f ressentiment as anger against the rigid categories o f identity against w hich the socially disaffected strug-gle yet to w hich they rem ain b o und .7 T he social boundaries that w ould exclude the fallen w om an from the com m unity also define the Bensons’ ow n powerlessness in relation to Bradshaw; disguising R u th , the Bensons construct a p lot that expresses in disguised form their ow n social discon-tent. Social sympathy, figured as the imaginative crossing o f social b o und-aries, is violently literalized here in the Bensons’ violation o f class b o u n d -aries. Ressentiment thus appears here as the expression and inevitable accom panim ent o f middle-class sympathy.

H eld responsible for the em otional w ell-being o f the family, V ictorian w om en were typically represented as conduits for either salutary or dan-gerous feeling. A ttem pting to construct an ideal sympathetic object, Gaskell seems to create a character o f pure receptivity— one w hose re-ceptivity is in fact the cause o f her fall. B ut from the beginning o f the novel, R u th is no ted as well for her ability to com m unicate feeling to o th -ers. W h en she arrives at the Bensons’, their servant Sally declares her sor-rowful feeling unacceptable since it threatens to “infect” others: Sally and Miss Benson “each had keen sympathies, and felt depressed w hen they saw anyone near them depressed.” Sally takes R u th ’s baby ou t o f his m o th er’s arms w hen, w hile looking at her face, “his little lip began to quiver, and his open blue eye to grow over-clouded, as w ith some mysterious sympathy

7 Scheler writes: “Ressentiment is apt to thrive among those w ho are alienated from thesocial order___These persons. . . hate the existing institutional arrangement but at thesame time feel unable to act out this hatred because they are bound to the existing scheme o f things.” Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. William W. Holdheim (N ew York: Free Press, 1969), 29. The basic account o f ressentiment is Friedrich Nietzsches in On the Genealogy of Morals. I have used the terms “resentment” and “ressentiment” somewhat interchangeably, though the latter refers to what is explicitly a social emotion, one that exists within a so-cial context in which mobility (the ability not just to identify with the other, but to oc-cupy the other s place) is simultaneously offered and denied. Sympathy and ressentiment re-semble each other: each depends upon social inequity and a theoretical possibility o f “becom ing” the other. Indeed, as an embodiment o f sympathy and o f ressentiment, Ruth enacts the other side o f Adam Smith s equation: sympathy as imagined from the sympa-thetic object s point o f view. Ressentiment in this account takes shape as a projection o f class anxieties and desires: as the psychologization o f class envy and a justification for social in-equity.

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w ith the sorrowful face ben t over h im ” (173). In the novel, the te rm “in -fection” and the idea o f infectiousness are frequently used to refer to feel-ing: R u th is “infected” by Bellingham ’s am usem ent (15); Mr. Davis sug-gests that his wife has “infected” h im w ith a desire for children (437). Leonard, R u th ’s son, at one po in t develops a tendency to lie, the im plica-tion being that he has caught duplicity from his m other; he also “catches” her bravery later on (427). Gaskell’s use o f the infection m etaphor suggests the way fallenness in the novel is everyone’s problem . Literalizing the m etaphor, later, as disease, Gaskell paradoxically isolates the infection: since only R u th has been infected by Bellingham, only for her is fallenness the cause o f death.

Sally’s anxiety about the infectiousness o f R u th ’s feeling evokes the fear o f contam ination conventionally associated w ith fallen w om en; it also amplifies an anxiety about the pow er o f the sympathetic object that sug-gests, again, the potential fluidity o f class identity in the novel. These scenes dramatize no t A dam Sm ith’s general idea o f sympathy— the im ag-ining o f the self i f the o ther’s place— but rather a fear o f sym pathy’s re-versibility, as if the o th e r’s identity m ight too easily becom e o n e ’s own. W hen , in an effort to assist in her disguise, Sally abruptly cuts R u th s hair, w hat is ostensibly done to make her resemble a w idow is in effect a test o f submissiveness and an insistence on difference: a dram atization o f the giv-ing up o f identity in exchange for sympathy. A nd the novel as a w hole, like this scene, dramatizes sym pathy’s transform ation— and, ultimately, com plete appropriation— o f its object.

R u th ’s disguise— the covering o f one identity by another— functions as an attem pt to transform one kind o f feeling in to another, and as the novel progresses, R u th becom es an instrum ent for allaying the disruptive feel-ings her “fallen” self represents. After Sally’s w arning, R u th ’s potential to “infect” others is transform ed in to an “unconscious pow er o f enchant-m e n t” (179), an unw illed com m unication o f serene and harm onious feel-ing. (Significantly, the w arning is delivered by a female servant w ho has undergone a similar transform ation, learning to discipline resentful feel-ings and accept her “station” [176].) W ith this transform ation, Gaskell im -plicitly defines as the novel’s task n o t so m uch the alteration o f characters’ and readers’ feelings about R u th bu t rather R u th ’s ability to alter their feelings about themselves and each other, an ability rem iniscent o f the k ind o f reparation for past transgressions one o f Gaskell’s early critics de-

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scribed as necessary for the fallen w om an: “T he sin o f unchastity in the w om an is, above all, a breaking up or loosening o f the family b ond— a treason against the family order o f G o d ’s w orld— so the restoration o f the sinner consists m ainly in the renewal o f that bond, in the realization o f that order, b o th by and th rough and around herself.”8 “By and th rough and around herself”— but n o t for herself—R u th radiates feelings o f seren-ity and cheerfulness; w ithou t in tention , “w ith no though t o f self tainting it” (366), she disseminates familial harmony. T hrough tensions w ith in the identities o f Benson, Bradshaw, Farquhar, and Jem im a, Gaskell displaces the issue o f sympathy for the social or m oral o ther onto the problem o f unifying middle-class identity. A nd the reform ation o f character in w hich R u th assists w ith in the novel resembles the reform ation o f identity her author w ished to effect outside it: w ith her peculiar pow er to transform the feelings o f others, R u th em bodies the transformative pow er Gaskell hoped her novel w ould possess.

R u th ’s influence comes to bear m ost significantly on the character w ho possesses “passionate impulses” rem iniscent o f conventional anxiety about fallen w om en: Bradshaw’s daughter, Jemima. R esisting her father’s desire to control her choice o f a husband, Jem im a is described as being in “silent rebellion” against h im (215). In a central episode, Bradshaw asks R u th to encourage Jem im a to soften her behavior toward Mr. Farquhar, the m an he wishes her to marry. T ho u g h R u th never consents to Bradshaw ’s plan, and indeed disapproves o f it, it works despite her: by “simply banishing unpleasant subjects, and throw ing a w holesom e natural sunlit tone over others, R u th had insensibly draw n Jem im a out o f her gloom ” (234). Dissolving ill feeling, R u th reconciles unruly impulse w ith patriarchal design; w hat Jem im a later describes, resentfully, as “admirable m anagem ent” (241) is accom plished by R u th ’s unconscious role in Bradshaw’s plan.

W h en Jem im a learns o f her father’s request, she is outraged at this at-tem pt at m anagem ent, and the novel seems to endorse her outrage. B ut it goes on to m anipulate R u th ’s feeling to achieve the same end. For Farquhar subsequently becom es attracted to R u th as “ the very type o f w hat a w om an should b e ” (308), and bo th th rough the influence that makes Jem im a behave according to her fathers wishes, and through

8 “Ruth: A N ovel by the Author o f Mary Barton,” North British Review 19 (1853): 155.

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Farquhar’s attraction to herself, R u th encourages the m arriage the father desires. D escribed as “one w ho always though t before she spoke (as Mr. Farquhar used to bid Jem im a to do) and w ho was never tem pted by sud-den impulse but walked the world calm and self-governed” (242), R u th functions as a m odel for and unconscious influence on Jem im a, focusing her feeling and tam ing her impulse. B ut— in a m anner that connects the novels authorial consciousness to R u th ’s “unconscious”influence— the greater po rtion o f that w ork is done by the p lot o f the novel itself.

Jem im a’s story, and Jem im a’s impulsiveness, are clearly a m uted version o f R u th ’s: a w arning about impulse that leads away from the family T he episode stages the solidification o f V ictorian middle-class fem inine iden-tity as a function o f the recognition and externalization o f o n e’s “fallen” self: “standing,” the narrator com m ents, “ [Jemima] had learned to take heed lest she fell” (370). Sympathy mediates Jem im as internal conflict be-tw een passion and authority, as Jem im a’s resentm ent toward her father finds ju st cause in her sympathy for R u th . A nd that same sympathy si-multaneously enables her to com e to term s w ith Farquhar, thus fulfilling her father’s wish: “ the unacknow ledged bond betw een them now was their grief, and sympathy, and pity for R u th .” In a displacement similar to that o f the Bensons, threatening identification is transform ed into sympa-thetic difference. R edefin ing the nature o f Jem im a’s passion and dif-ferentiating it from the unruly feeling it m ight seem to resemble, Gaskell bo th exposes the novel’s undercurren t o f disruptive feeling and resolves the conflict that feeling causes. By means o f this solution— in w hich the unconscious dissem ination o f feeling and the deliberate attem pt to m a-nipulate it am ount to the same thing (the novel’s p lot is the same as the fa-th e r’s plot)— Gaskell enlists R u th ’s affective pow er in the service o f a strengthened familial order. B ut that order, finally, has no place for her.

T h roughou t the novel, Gaskell returns repeatedly to the issue o f eco-nom ic and em otional debt. H er insistent detailing o f such debt, along w ith her careful recounting o f the discomforts o f the Bensons’ poverty and the Bradshaws’ ostentatious wealth, links the Bensons’ fictionalizing to their resentm ent; even m ore suggestive is the way R u th ’s presence in Bradshaw’s hom e disturbs the m anufacturer’s em phatic desire to m aintain legible so-cial boundaries. B reaking th rough social and econom ic barriers, the Bensons’ deception constitutes the ir ow n “silent rebellion,” expressing bo th a frustration at the fixedness o f social boundaries and a resentm ent

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against Bradshaw’s pow er in the com munity. O nly a few things circulate betw een the B enson and Bradshaw households: m oney in the form o f pew rents, gifts from Bradshaw, and R u th . R u th is the Bensons’ gift to Bradshaw: their answer to his patronage. B oth as Mrs. D enbigh, a charac-ter invented by Faith, and as Bradshaw’s employee, she exposes the vul-nerability o f the hom e on w hose security Bradshaw stakes his identity and that o f his family, the hom e that w ould place her irretrievably outside it and define her as incapable o f redem ption.9 A conduit for the feelings o f others and a figure o f silent rebellion herself, R u th enables the expression o f class feeling w hose existence the Bensons cannot own. Figuring sym-pathy and resentm ent simultaneously, she exemplifies sympathetic identity as a fo rm o f currency: she is the means o f paym ent, the coin offered to shore up the Bensons’ fragile identities.

Gaskell has been praised for her ow n transgression o f middle-class norm s in her representation o f the unconventional Benson household: the femi-nized minister, the strong sister, and the hearty servant represent social and m oral alternatives to the Bradshaws, unhappy in their prescribed roles (Jemima rages against her father’s dom inance; Mrs. Bradshaw looks “as if she was thoroughly broken into submission” [153]). B ut in aligning R u th w ith feelings o f resentment, I am relying on the way in w hich the Bensons feel themselves to be outsiders in their ow n com m unity and suggesting that their sympathy for her expresses that shared status. (Sympathy, the novel ex-plicitly suggests, depends on secret likeness; late in the novel, Mr. Davis offers to raise R u th ’s son in just such terms: “I knew Leonard was illegiti-m ate— in fact, I will give you secret for secret: it was being so myself that first made m e sympathize w ith h im ” [441].) T he line Faith’s lie draws be-tw een the Bensons and the rest o f the com m unity expresses their uncon-ventionality and marks their alienation. Benson is deform ed, his sister un -m arried, and Gaskell repeatedly associates them w ith an older way \of life, one that is now in ideological com petition w ith the livelihood o f the pros-perous mercantile classes. Despite their function as the moral center o f the book, they lack the vitality o f the less scrupulous, m ore financially success-

9 N ote Gaskell’s own metaphor for the fallen wom ans fate: “Respectability shuts the door upon her.” Q uoted in M onica Fryckstedt, Elizabeth GaskelVs “Mary Barton” and “Ruth”:A Challenge to Christian England (Uppsala, 1982), 138. O n woman as mediator be-tween inside and outside, see Janet Todd, Sensibility : An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), 100.

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fui Bradshaw. W om en— particularly unm arried w om en— and priests are am ong the figures Scheler singles ou t as likely candidates for feelings o f ressentiment; in particular, Benson recalls Scheler’s discussion o f the priest, w hose role requires that he “always represent the image and principle o f peacefulness.” 10 T h e Bensons’ social fall is linked symbolically to R u th ’s m oral one; Benson even averts her suicide by literally falling to the ground while pursuing her. For the Bensons, feeling for R u th is a way o f no t feel-ing for themselves: it is a way o f gaining distance from, even as it implicitly acknowledges, an unstable social position. Expressing w hat Barbara Ehrenreich has called a “fear o f falling” endem ic to the m iddle class, the B ensons’ sympathy acknowledges in displaced form — through iden-tification w ith a figure publicly identified as an outcast— the marginality those w ith lim ited social pow er perceive in their ow n positions.11

Sympathy in R uth is identified w ith a threatened disturbance in, and subversion of, the rig id categories o f identity— particularly fem inine iden-tity— that w ould exclude R u th from respectable society. A nd that subver-sion is possible only if R u th ’s identity retains its transgressive force. It thus makes sense that the disruptive energy Gaskell attem pts to elim inate by constructing R u th as innocent returns via the m echanism o f disguise. By displacing the novel’s focus from R u th ’s fall to Faith’s lie, Gaskell alters the stakes o f sympathizing w ith R u th (and w ith Ruth) to include no t just sym-pathizing, bu t fictionalizing, or, in the novel’s terms, lying: there is no mis-taking the analogy betw een Faith’s pleasure in m anufacturing details o f R u th ’s identity and Gaskell’s ow n activity. For w hile Benson m ight be said to identify w ith R u th ’s outsider status and vulnerability, or w ith her un -conscious deviation from m oral behavior, Faith seizes upon her as an op-portun ity for transgression, saying “ I do th ink I ’ve a talent for fiction, it isso pleasant to invent and make the incidents dovetail toge ther___I amafraid I enjoy n o t being fettered by tru th ” (150). T h rough her fictionalizing, Faith strikes a blow against the rig id roles that keep the R u ths and the Mrs. Bradshaws o f the w orld “broken in to submission” ; she disrupts the hom e organized around the assertion o f Puritanical values, and deceives the patriarch, Bradshaw, w hose outrage anticipates that o f

10 Scheler, Ressentiment, 36.11 Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (N ew York:

Pantheon, 1989).

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Gaskell’s outraged male readers— and ultim ately chastens Faith’s pleasure in the production o f narrative. T he analogy betw een Faith’s fictionalizing and Gaskell’s— betw een getting R u th into the Bradshaw hom e and get-ting Ruth in to the hom es o f Gaskell’s readers— affirms, however, the in -separability o f Gaskell’s plea for sympathy from the social discontent that plea expresses.12 Like her author, Faith Benson transforms resentm ent into fiction; inventing character to gain authority, she suggests the potential fluidity o f social boundaries and social authority. H er fictionalizing works to alter the balance o f pow er in a com m unity in w hich B enson’s m oral concerns had been increasingly marginalized, his financial dependence on Bradshaw underm in ing his m oral position.

“I want to know how I am to keep remembering how old I am, so as to prevent myself from feeling so young?”(Faith Benson, looking in the mirror, 206)

Sympathy in Ruth is an identification w ith the marginal, expressed in the falling that links Benson w ith R u th and the disguise w herein he and his sister reproduce their ow n conflicted identities. B ut it is also a m echa-nism for eliding that identification, enabling the novel’s characters to re-tain their places in the social hierarchy and rem ain unconscious, like R u th , o f the ressentiment she em bodies. As we have seen, Gaskell insists upon R u th ’s unconsciousness: her ignorance o f social convention saves her from participation in her fall; the lack o f deliberateness in her subsequent be-havior underscores her essential value (both Benson and Bradshaw admire R u th ’s “com plete unconsciousness o f uncom m on power,” the fact that “she did n o t th ink o f herself at all” [187]). H er unconsciousness, I have suggested, defines her as a figure o f ressentiment: one w ho cannot act on

12 Gaskell connected her own feelings about the novel with the idea o f sexual trans-gression, identifying with her heroine. In her letters, she describes herself as being in pain from the things people are saying about Ruth; she is ill, and says she believes she must be ill with a “R uth fever.” And in a comment reminiscent o f R uth’s “unconscious” fall, she writes, “I think I must be an improper woman without knowing it.” J. A. V. Chappie and Arthur Pollard, eds., The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967),letter 150 (1853).

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her ow n behalf, and for w hom others are invited to feel, she em bodies the anger the Bensons cannot express directly.13 T he character w ho exists as pure receptivity is, as A m anda A nderson points out, “ a m ere slave to the other.” 14 (And as such, R u th s extrem e passivity may be said to suggest its opposite: no t ju st the B enson’s ressentiment but, in a displaced fashion, her own: the rage o f the fallen wom an.)

B ut the novel also associates unconsciousness w ith a desire to escape middle-class identity and its seem ingly inevitable transgressions. W h en R u th first m eets Benson, she is about to drow n herself—in the novel’s words, to “seek forgetfulness.” Benson saves her by enabling her to replace one fo rm o f self-forgetfulness w ith another; he falls, and his fall “did w hat no rem onstrance could have done; it called her ou t o f herse lf” (97). T hat initial m eeting connects the capacity for sympathy w ith self-forgetfulness, and th roughou t the novel, the possibility o f R u th ’s redem ption is identified w ith R u th ’s forgetting o f her form er self. Indeed, she is m ost herself w hen m ost “ou t o f herself,” helping the po o r and the sick in an effort “ to forget w hat had gone before this last twelve m on ths” (191). (Benson too strives “ to leave his life in the hands o f G od, and to forget him self” [142].) It is as if the absence o f consciousness R u th exemplifies, and for w hich B enson longs, expresses a desire for relief from conscious-ness, identified in this novel w ith an almost unbearable sense o f self-division. Indeed, it may be in her unconsciousness— identified w ith her unselfconsciousness— that R u th best exemplifies middle-class identity: sympathy here resembles a state o f forgetfulness that serves to assure the sym pathizer o f the unquestioned, secure nature o f his o r her identity. After all, the issue for middle-class identity, as the novel w orries it (and Faith s com m ent implies) is “rem em bering” w ho one is, as if identity inheres in its active maintenance. B ut while sympathy here may seem to offer m iddle- class identity a w elcom e unselfconsciousness, it also suggests the absence

13 Amanda Anderson argues that R uth’s character represents an antidote to determin-ism, especially the determinism o f social construction. What the novel reveals, however, is the identity o f character with social construction: social identity may be a fiction, even a lie, but the transformation o f R uth’s character into pure receptivity results in the creation o f a character whose boundaries finally dissolve completely. Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 127-40.

14 Ibid., 138.

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o f an essential self: the way in w hich identity built on identification with others may be imagined as no identity at all.

As R uth takes on the fallen wom ans traditional role and moves toward death, the novel insists even more emphatically on her emptiness. O n her deathbed, as she becomes literally unconscious, she also becomes literally selfless: lying ill, “She could not remember the present time, or where she was . . . she was stretched on the bed in utter helplessness, softly gazing at vacancy w ith her open, unconscious eyes, from w hich all the depth o f their meaning had fled” (444,448). Lying “in utter helplessness, softly gaz-ing at vacancy,” R uth becom es an emblem both o f the vacancy o f the ideal sympathetic observer, w ho forgets herself in her devotion to others, and o f sympathy’s object, displaced by the spectators projection. In at-tempting to construct an ideally sympathetic character, Gaskell develops the sympathetic object to its logical extreme, finally exposing her charac-ter as a palimpsest o f the cultural desires and anxieties that surround the figure o f the fallen woman. “She could not remember w ho she was now, or where she was” (444). Mrs. Denbigh, the novel seeks to reassure us, was never anything more than a fantasy about social mobility; m oving easily from one social position to another, R uth gives up the hold on identity she might have possessed had she stayed in one place.

The exposure o f R uth s “true” self is thus only another move in the novels continual construction and dismantling o f her identity. It clarifies her function in the novel, legitimating and solidifying— even as the his-tory o f her identity may be said to undermine— the identities o f the novels other characters. As w e have seen, Gaskell initially establishes social and moral uncertainty as norms o f middle-class identity: the novels char-acters are perpetually self-divided, guilt-ridden about the moral laxness and social uneasiness they seem unable to avoid. But the narrative works to efface such discomfort; though it rejects Bradshaw s desire for firm prin-ciples (“She has turned right into wrong, and wrong into right, and taught you all to be uncertain whether there be any such thing as Vice in the world” [339]), som ehow events transpire so as to leave no uncertainty about everyones feelings toward Ruth. The novel transforms social iden-tity into emotional unanimity, as social difference gives way to shared feel-ing and an unconsciousness o f the tensions R uth s presence made visible.

The novels plot demands the working out o f the conflict between Benson and Bradshaw, and the breach R uth s discovery causes between

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them — Bradshaw had refused to continue attending B enson’s chapel (hence denying h im his pew rents)— im m ediately effects a transm utation o f resentm ent in to affection: “H e [Benson] felt acutely the severance o f the tie w hich M r. Bradshaw had ju st announced to him . H e had experi-enced m any m ortifications in his intercourse w ith that gentlem an, bu t they had fallen o ff from his m eek spirit like drops o f w ater from a b ird’splum age; and now he only rem em bered the acts o f substantial kindness___[H]e had never recognized Mr. Bradshaw as an old familiar friend so com -pletely, as now w hen they were severed” (352). B ut B enson’s guilt about his failure to recognize Bradshaw m erely suggests guilt about his ow n ressentiment; the novel’s plot, rather than dissolving class boundaries, has characters appear to forget that such boundaries ever disturbed them . B ut sympathy, in the end, demands a series o f falls: Bradshaw’s son, for instance, is first revealed to be a forger and then injured in a coach accident.15 A nd w hen Bradshaw sits in B enson’s church w ith his head “bow ed dow n low in prayer” w here once “he had stood erect, w ith an air o f conscious righ t-eousness,” his dem eanor convinces B enson that “the old friendly feeling existed once m ore betw een th em ” (422).

As these scenes suggest, the novel rem em bers everywhere w hat it claims its characters can forget; Gaskell’s language continues to invoke the hierar-chical structure it insists has disappeared. T he novel’s end finds Benson at the “apex” o f the com m unity: preaching about R u th after her death, he surveys around him “one and all— the well-filled Bradshaw pew — all in deep m ourning, M r. Bradshaw conspicuously so . . . the Farquhars— the m any strangers— the still m ore num erous poor— one or tw o w ild-looking outcasts, w ho stood afar off, but w ept silently and continually” (456-57).16 M oving from center to margins, high to low, the m inister’s eye defines the

15 The elimination o f uncertainty— o f differences in feeling— thus requires a certain vi-olence. For Bradshaw to be made part o f the community— part, spiritually, o f Gaskell’s middle class— he must fall; it is not enough that his son turns out to be a forger, but the son must suffer a serious accident to awaken the father’s humanity. Indeed, the novel’s ob-sessive literalization o f the falling metaphor suggests the violence with w hich Gaskell imagines the social or moral fall. Benson’s deformity is “owing to a fall he had had” (135); Richard Bradshaw is seriously injured in his coach accident. The latter case in particular literalizes Bradshaw’s unspoken fear: that self-forgery will lead to a fall.

16 In 1849 Edward Miall described the way old parish churches, and in particular the pew system, reproduced social inequalities: “The poor man is made to feel that he is a poor

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congregation as an idealized m icrocosm o f the social whole, its m em bers’ ability to share the same feelings unaffected by social difference. Finally, the novel’s m odel for the circulation o f feeling is no longer an infectious b lur-ring o f boundaries bu t an assertion o f harm ony in social difference, o f per-sonal relationships disturbed by no feelings arising from social inequities. Sympathy provides a way out o f im m ediate social conflicts and produces a fiction o f bo th individual and com m unal unity here, no t because it resolves conflict, bu t rather because it enables the evacuation or forgetting o f conflict in the m anufacture o f sympathetic subjects and objects.

T he invention o f M rs. D enbigh m ight be read as a sign o f Gaskell’s awareness o f the difficulty, even impossibility, o f gaining sympathy for her heroine: an im plicit acknow ledgm ent that sympathy for the fallen w om an as fallen w om an is impossible to achieve. T he disguise m ight be consid-ered a strategic ploy, an attem pt to encourage readers, aware as they are o f R u th ’s “tru e ” identity, to position themselves in opposition to the narrow -m inded M r. Bradshaws o f the w orld. In either case, the Bensons’ lie raises the same suspicion as R u th ’s death: the suspicion that, if she is to w in sym-pathy, R u th cannot be “herself.” For in w hat w ould such a self consist? In R u th , Gaskell describes an identity so enm eshed in the projections o f o th -ers, and in literary convention (her nam e tells us her story), that it becom es a kind o f exposure o f the pow er o f the type— an assertion o f the capacity o f cultural identity to annihilate any sense o f individual identity alto-gether. In this novel, as in o ther fallen w om an novels, unconsciousness is the au thor’s way o f protecting her heroine from sexual knowledge. B ut it is also the m anifestation in character o f the way sympathy denies its object agency and in tention , m aking it no t at all surprising that, on her deathbed, R u th “could no t rem em ber w ho she was now.”

Early in the novel, Gaskell foregrounds the naturalness o f R u th ’s sympa-thetic identity: her responsiveness to nature, her lack o f self-consciousness,

man, the rich is reminded that he is rich, in the great majority o f our churches andchapels___the arrangements are generally such as to preclude in their [the poor’s] bosomsany momentary feeling o f essential equality. We have no negro pews, for we have no prej-udice against colour— but we have distinct places for the pennyless, for we have a morbid horror o f poverty.” Quoted in Fryckstedt, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, 58-59.

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her innocence o f the social world. W h en Bellingham beckons her to look at her image in a pond, “She obeyed, and could no t help seeing her ow n loveliness; it gave her a sense o f satisfaction for an instant, as the sight o f any o ther beautiful creature w ould have done, bu t she never though t o f associating it w ith herse lf” (74). R u th ’s inability to associate her image w ith herself, and the tension betw een w hat she “could no t help” and w hat she “never th o u g h t”— betw een the natural and the social— appear again in a similar set piece at the novel’s end. W h en Bellingham returns, R u th finds herself in church being observed by him , and “in this extrem e ten -sion o f m ind to hold in her bew ildered agony” focuses on a gargoyle in one corner o f the room .

The face was beautiful. . . but it was not the features that were the most striking part. There was a half-open m outh, not in any way distorted out o f its exquisite beauty by the intense expression of suffering it conveyed. Any distortion o f the face by mental agony, implies that a struggle with circumstance is going on. But in this face, if such struggle had been, itwas over now. Circumstance had conquered__ And though the partedlips seemed ready to quiver w ith agony, yet the expression o f the whole face, owing to these strange, stony, and yet spiritual eyes, was high andconsoling__ W ho could have imagined such a look? W ho could havewitnessed— perhaps felt— such infinite sorrow, and yet dared to lift it up by Faith into a peace so pure?. . . H um an art was ended— human life done— human suffering over; but this remained; it stilled R u th ’s beating heart to look on it. (282-83)

T h e gargoyle projects R u th ’s struggle in to the future, suggesting at the same tim e the future the novel has in store for her: the fulfillm ent o f her objectification in death. A vision o f suffering transm uted— lifted up (“by Faith”)— into art, it also crystallizes the aestheticizing process in w hich the novel is engaged and recapitulates the structure o f sympathy on w hich it depends. In this scene, R u th reflects upon an external image she now here explicitly names as a reflection— an im age that, in effect, em bodies her ow n em otional history. T he emphasis is on an image that collapses narra-tive: an image in w hich noth ing is left o f the character’s history bu t op-posing images o f suffering and its transcendence. Focusing on that figure, R u th focuses, for the novel’s readers, the tensions she herself em bodies; as

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she does so, she becom es— like the statue— “still.” M oving beyond R u th ’s consciousness to seek the “lo o k ” that transform ed hers in to art, Gaskell’s narrator locates an understanding o f the gargoyle s significance in the con-sciousnesses o f the novel’s readers, unifying them around the doubled image o f R u th . H ere, as in East Lynne— as my next chapter argues— class identity is figured as em otional unanimity, as subjects are “ stilled” by an im age o f the ir social identifications and the conflicts to w hich those identifications lead. In this “unconscious” act o f identification, the sympa-thetic observer— like the fallen w om an, and like Sherlock H olm es— gains identity in the act o f losing it. M iddle-class identity itself, by this account, is Ruth's scene o f sympathy.

Isabel’s Spectacles: Seeing Value in East Lynne

“The world goes round and round by rules o f contrary.. . . We despise what we have, and covet that which we cannot get.”

— Ellen Wood, East Lynne

T o w a rd the end o f Ellen W ood’s East Lynne (1863), Barbara Carlyle recounts to her family’s governess, M adam e Vine, the story o f Isabel Vane’s elopem ent— not know ing that the governess actually is Isabel, Carlyle’s first wife, transform ed by the com bined effects o f a disfiguring railway accident and a disguise. Barbara includes the one detail o f w hich Isabel is unaware: that Francis Levison, the m an for w hom Isabel left her husband, is now know n to be a murderer. Isabel responds to that detail, and to the cumulative effect o f hearing the entire story, im m ediately and phys-ically: “ In spite o f her caution, o f her strife for self-command, she tu rned o f a deadly whiteness, and a low sharp cry o f ho rro r and despair burst from her lips__ ‘I beg your pardon, Mrs. Carlyle,’ she shivered: T am apt to pic-ture things too vividly. It is, as you say, so very horrible.’ ”*

1 Mrs. Henry W ood, East Lynne, ed. Sally M itchell (N ew Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 417. Subsequent page numbers are included in the text. See Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (N ew York: Routledge,

95

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Isabel m ight be regarded here as a m odel for sensation fiction s ideal reader: one for w hom that genre’s too-vivid pictures provide an occasion for the experience and release o f powerful affect. Indeed, spending consid-erably m ore tim e detailing Isabels response to representations o f her expe-rience than it does recounting that experience itself, the novel suggests the superiority o f representation and sensational narrative over the experience represented to produce affect and sensation. Positioning Isabel as audience to her ow n story— asking her, in effect, to sympathize w ith herself as a fictional character— W ood reproduces bo th the reader’s relation to Isabel and the divided structure o f Isabels ow n experience in the novel’s latter half, w hich finds her situated as spectator to the familial life o f Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle: to the life she m ight have led, that is, had she no t run away w ith Levison. In doing so, the novel renders Isabel’s sympathy for a fictional char-acter inseparable from her identity as that character (this is the same literal- ization o f identification found “A Christmas Carol,” in w hich the shock o f recognition stems from the fact that the character in the story is you), and it implicates its readers in her identification: sympathy w ith Isabel is aligned w ith reflection on, and horror at, the story she now recognizes as her own. In this way, as, later, in Isabel’s active reconstruction o f her body and iden-tity, the novel defines her, has her define herself, and implicitly defines its readers as effects o f sympathetic identification. To sympathize w ith Isabel, in W ood’s novel, is manifestly to sympathize w ith representation.

R e ce n t criticism o f sensation fiction finds in the genre’s reliance on w hat m ight be called bodily sympathy (as in the com m unication o f ner-vousness from character to reader) an erasure o f representation, an evoca-tion o f the real and the natural in somatic responses that seem to efface the boundary betw een reader and tex t.2 B u t Barbara’s narrative and Isabel’s spectatorship stage this ostensible erasure as a response to representation, affirming less the im m ediacy o f sensation’s effect on the body than the role o f cultural representations— such as East Lynne's ow n sensational narra-tive— as m ediators o f sensation and its meanings. Isabel’s response to

1991), 19, on the way the absence o f spectatorial distance characterizes the construction o f female subjectivity— the way in which wom en always “picture too vividly.”

2 See D. A. Miller, “Cage aux folles,” in The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1988), 146-91; Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (N ew Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

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Barbara’s narrative, like the agony o f suffering she endures in her position as spectator, aligns her em brace o f middle-class values w ith the m ediation o f her experience by representation— or, in the novel’s term , “ reflection.” R a th e r than grounding affect directly in the body, that is, East Lynne h igh-lights the cultural construction o f ideological effects— a highlighting for w hich the eyeglasses Isabel wears as part o f her disguise (which bo th frame the scenes she witnesses and make a spectacle o f Isabel herself) will serve as my m etaphor. D espite the novel’s reliance on the idea o f unm ediated bodily response (as in Isabel’s sexual response to Levison), then, I w ish to argue that experience in East Lynne counts m ost heavily and leaves a m ore lasting im pression w hen filtered th rough Isabel’s spectacular lenses. In par-ticular, fram ing its representations o f dom esticity th rough and as Isabel’s spectacles, the novel reveals them to be, precisely, vivid pictures.

M eeting Frances Levison in Boulogne, w here Carlyle has sent her for her health, Isabel “shrank from self-exam ination” (175). N o sooner has she left East Lynne w ith Levison, however, abandoning husband and hom e, than she develops a capacity for “ reflection,” sim ultaneously recognizing the “ tru e ” nature o f her action: “T h e very ho u r o f her departure she awoke to w hat she had done: the g u i l t . . . assumed at once its true, fright-ful colour ” (237). “T he terrible position in w hich she found herself, had brough t to Lady Isabel reflection. N o t the reflection, so called, that may com e to us w ho yet live in and for the w orld, but that w hich must, almost o f necessity, attend one w hose part in the w orld is over” (249). M uch o f the rem ainder o f the novel is taken up w ith this process o f reflection, in w hich Isabel reim agines— in their “ true colors”— events she has witnessed or experienced (the best exam ple is the scene o f Carlyle and Barbara w alking in the m oonlight, a scene to w hich the novel returns repeatedly and w hich, appearing to confirm Isabel’s suspicions o f her husband’s infidelity, prom pts her departure). Indeed, the entire second part o f the novel, w hich finds Isabel installed as governess to her ow n children in the Carlyle hom e, in essence constitutes such a reflection, as Isabel, w earing the tin ted spectacles som e V ictorian actresses used to indicate the entire none-too-fla ttering disguise, entertains vivid pictures o f w hat w ould have been her life had she rem ained.3 “T hen came another phase o f the pic-

3 O n the glasses, see Sally Mitchell, introduction to East Lynne, xiv.

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t u r e s h e im agines before returning: “H ow could she bear to see M r. Carlyle the husband o f another?— to live in the same house w ith them , to witness his attentions, possibly his caresses?” (333). “T he old scenes passed th rough her m ind, like the changing pictures in a phantasm agoria” (493).

In this process o f reflection, things Isabel initially observed through an os-tensibly distorted lens are said to assume their true colors, as in the follow-ing account o f the transformation o f her consciousness: “As her eyes opened to her folly and to the true character o f Francis Levison, so in proportion did they close to the fault by w hich her husband had offended her. She saw it in fainter colours; she began to suspect— nay, she knew — that her ow n ex-cited feelings had m agnified it in length, and breadth, and height__ She re-m em bered his [Carlyle’s] noble qualities; doubly noble did they appear to her, now that her interest in them must cease. .. her esteem, her admiration, her affection for him , had returned to her fourfold. We never know the full value o f a thing until we lose it” (249). H er eyes opening and closing at once— opening to an inward scene as they close to the external w orld— Isabel weighs her losses and readjusts her vision. R egistering changes in m oral value as shifts in visual values, this passage illustrates bo th the bour-geois nature o f perception in the novel (its relentless attem pt to measure, to value, everything) and the embourgeoisement o f Isabel’s consciousness: as the passage slides effortlessly from “appear” to “know,” swelling Carlyle’s retro-spective value, Isabel’s body and vision serve (as they do throughout the novel’s latter half) as instrum ents for the recalibration o f social value.4

D efin ing the acquisition o f know ledge as a readjustm ent o f vision— giving Isabel colored glasses th rough w hich to view things in their “ tru e” colors— the novel bo th suggests that she needs corrective lenses and offers a m etaphor for its ow n ideological coloring. For rejecting w hat she now perceives as “m agnified,” Isabel sim ultaneously expresses her discovery o f tru th in equally exaggerated term s: “she rem em bered his noble qualities; doubly noble did they appear to h e r . . . her affection for h im had retu rned fourfold.” B u t if, indeed, “her ow n excited feelings had m agnified” Carlyle’s fault in “length, and breadth, and heigh t” (as if m easuring for a carpet, o r piece o f furniture), w ho is to say that her curren t feelings are

4 On the calibrations or rationalizations o f the middle-class household, see Anne M cClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (NewYork: Routledge, 1995), 168.

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any less the result o f magnification, or, as the passage has it, multiplication? M aking visible w hat it quickly moves to repress— the difficulty o f sepa-rating value from the “co lor” w ith w hich one sees it (or o f separating “know ledge” from “suspicion,” w ith the suggestion that the form er is no th ing bu t the fulfillm ent o f the latter— “she began to suspect— nay, she knew ”)— the passage calls attention to the instability o f its ideological cal-culus: its claim that “doubly” and “fourfold” add up to “full.”

G round ing tru th in the need for Isabel to re-see and revalue the events o f h e r life, W ood aligns Isabel’s “ discovery” o f the tru th o f bourgeois verities w ith represen ta tion in several form s. M ental “ reflection” co n -jures up “p ictures” and “phantasm agorias,” all o f w hich , aligned w ith the characteristic visual intensity o f sensation fiction and m elodram a, sug-gest the representational function o f the novel itself. A nd in East Lynne's second half, the pro jec tion o f dom estic spectacles th rough Isabel’s eye-glasses in effect renders them indistinguishable from productions o f her ow n consciousness and, by im plication, the consciousness o f readers w ho “see” th rough h er eyes. In a process that m irrors the self-alienation and desire p ro jected on the novel’s readers, then , Isabel’s new found in ferio r-ity and the in terio rities o f her readers are represented as effects o f the ability to project the self in to representations. “R eflecting ,” Isabel com es to know her true self; seeing “ correctly,” she attests to h er possession o f p roper values.5 Isabel’s in ferio rity is cultural representation: experience filtered th rough the categories o f bourgeois ideology.6 A nd, indeed, to

5 This despite Margaret Oliphants assertion that sympathy for Isabel would lead to “moral confusion.” East Lynne disturbed Oliphant because— like Gaskell’s Ruth— it seemed to her to direct feeling to the wrong place; in encouraging readers to sympathize with Isabel, Oliphant writes, W ood makes “the w orse. . . the better cause” (“Novels,” Blackwoods' 94 [1863]: 170). But to sympathize with Isabel at this point in the novel is to identify with her desire to occupy Barbara’s place: Readers who identify with Isabel imag-inatively invest themselves in a consciousness emptied o f everything but a gaze; the spec-tacles through which they look are filled with the domestic scene that has becom e the novel’s locus o f value.

6 Susan Stewart describes a similar effect as characteristic o f nostalgia: “The inability o f the sign to ‘capture’ its signified, o f narrative to be at one with its object, and o f the gen-res o f mechanical reproduction to approximate the time o f face-to-face communication leads to a generalized desire for origin, for nature, and for unmediated experience that is at work in nostalgic longing.” On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 23-24.

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sym pathize w ith Isabel is to sym pathize w ith represen ta tion in several form s. U nable to participate in m iddle-class life by v irtue o f her aristo-cratic identity, figured as her oversensitive body, Isabel in the latter half o f the novel “assents” (W ood’s term ) w ith all the intensity o f her spec- tatorship and suffering to the value o f that life. E liciting readerly sym pa-thy for Isabel largely th rough the m echanism o f spectatorship— requ ir-ing readers, as a cond ition o f sym pathy for her, to gaze b o th at and th rough the eyeglasses that m ark her as spectator and spectacle— W ood ties readerly sym pathy to a co n d itio n o f spectatorship. Sym pathy for Isabel is iden tified w ith a relentless spectatorship tha t m irrors Isabel’s ow n; it depends up o n identification w ith the representations for w hich she com es to yearn, and w ith her yearning for them . Indeed, in several ways Isabel’s story registers her social fall as a fall in to representation: as an increasing involvem ent w ith spectacle, reflection, p ro jection , dissim-ulation, and disguise. To identify w ith Isabel is to identify w ith Isabel’s spectacles: those she sees, those she wears, and those in w h ich she ap-pears; it is also to sym pathize w ith an identity in w hich , as in the fiction called the m iddle class, im ages o f various class identities jostle against one another. As a fallen aristocrat, and in particular a w om an in decline, Isabel-in-disguise em erges as a paradigm atic figure for a fractured m iddle-class identity, an im age that captures the tensions betw een high and low, “n a tu re” and artifice, o u t w h ich this iden tity is constitu ted . R e n d e rin g sym pathy a spectator’s m elodram a, East Lynne makes specta-torship a co n d itio n o f sym pathy and, in do ing so, discloses the role played by sym pathy and spectatorship, and sym pathy w ith spectatorship, in the construc tion o f m iddle-class identity.

W ood’s reliance on a dynam ic o f scenes and spectators has, it has often been noted, obvious affinities w ith stage m elodram a.7 B ut that connection does no t so m uch explain away her reliance on spectatorship as suggest the way bo th the popular novel and stage m elodram a reflect and reproduce the increasingly spectatorial nature o f experience in the 1860s. To describe the scenes Isabel imagines as a phantasm agoria, as W ood does, is to im ag-ine a spectator in the m ind: to include spectatorship in subjectivity’s definition. As E. A nn Kaplan notes, East Lynne dem onstrates the way the

7 As Sally Mitchell notes o f stage adaptations o f East Lynne, “The essential scenes were in W ood’s novel” (Mitchell, introduction to East Lynne, xv).

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popular novel is “affected by the culture o f the spectacle,” revealing in tu rn the way that culture “ transform[s] the subject’s ways o f perceiving and de-s irin g ”8

H ere as in “A Christm as Carol,” however, spectacular forms o f cultural representation do no t create but rather reinforce cultural values already in place. East Lynne’s visuality amplifies the spectacular function o f m iddle- class V ictorian w om en, for w hom visible details indicated status and value; the novel functions in large part as a fem inine phantasm agoria, a portrait gallery in w hich w om en hone their ability to distinguish good fem inine spectacles from bad ones and evaluate the pictures o ther w om en make. For Isabel em bodies the contradictory tensions o f a V ictorian middle-class fem inine identity that was, increasingly and preem inently in the m id-n ineteen th century, a m atter o f keeping up appearances: o f displaying the visible evidence o f middle-class status.9 Sympathy w ith representation, for instance, accurately describes Barbara’s activity as she observes and imitates Isabel’s m anipulation o f social codes (despite Isabel’s ostensible function as a negative role m odel, she is, as Jeanne B. Elliot points out, very m uch a

8 E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (London: Routledge, 1992), 62. Richard Altick dates the first London phantas-magoria as occurring in 1801 or 1802. But he also points out that the term “phantas-magoria,” like “panorama,” was “quickly was absorbed into the com m on vocabulary.” The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1978), 219. “By the 1860’s,” he writes, “they were well on their way to becom ing one o f the most widely attended o f all forms o f Victorian entertainment” (220). N o specific form o f representation need be at stake here, then; “phantasmagoria” signifies the general way in which “dull” subjects are “glamorized” by means o f technological projection (220). But the actual structure o f the phantasmago-ria (in which the size o f images projected from a magic lantern behind a screen could be increased or decreased to simulate movement toward or away from the audience) may also be relevant since, as one observer noted in the 1830s, images in a phantasmagoria could seem enlarged and all encompassing (219). In a manner relevant to Isabel’s experience at the Carlyle’s, as well as to East Lynne’s idealization o f middle-class life, audiences at the phantasmagoria were deceived into thinking they could touch the figures projected, so close and so real did those figures seem. The point was to focus the audience’s attention on the lighted figures: as Altick further remarks, “The ghostly figures were painted on glass ‘sliders,’ the extraneous portions o f which were blacked out so as to concentrate the lig h t.. . on the luminous images” (217).

9 O n middle-class feminine display, see Elizabeth Langland, Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995),

33- 34.

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lady).10 In several crucial scenes at the novel’s beginning— especially that o f Isabel’s first appearance in W est Lynne’s church, w h ich finds Barbara appointed in p ink parasol, bonnet, and feather, and Isabel elegantly under-stated in w hite m uslin— Isabel provides Barbara, and the novel’s readers as well, lessons in the m anagem ent o f female spectacularity. If, for Isabel, an adjustm ent o f values can lead to no th ing but, as the novel puts it, “one long scene o f repentance,” for Barbara and potentially for W ood’s readers as well an openness to the colors o f class value translates into a new identity, a new social self. Indeed, by the end o f the novel, Barbara— reproached in the novel’s first half for her love o f fm ery and for the failure o f control that results in her em otional ou tburst to Carlyle— has, by w atching Isabel, learned balance, and the ability to m anipulate her ow n self-representation to achieve it. H er accession to her position as Carlyle’s wife and mistress o f East Lynne serves as a m odel for a fluid, socially m obile subjectivity able to perceive the hues and shades, codes and controls, that enable m ovem ent from one class to another.11

Seem ing to value the identification that leads to social advancem ent, however, the novel also works to disavow the instability that identification suggests; w hile it values in Barbara the fluidity that leads to and defines middle-class identity, it disavows that fluidity in its scapegoating o f Isabel, condem ning her awareness o f the codes o f self-representation by associat-ing that awareness bo th w ith aristocratic indulgence and w ith disguise. In Isabel’s first public appearance at W est Lynne’s church, for instance, ou t- dressing the local w om en by no t dressing up at all, she avoids the “unnec-essary profusion o f splendour” Carlyle perceives that same day at the Earl’s dining table (53-54). B ut subsequent events suggest that w ith in her ap-parent m odesty lies an undesirable canniness about self-presentation. Later,

10 Elliott writes that despite Isabel’s beginning as the Earl’s daughter and ending as a governess, she remains a “lady” in w hom “every Victorian female reader could encounter an idealized version o f herself.” See “A Lady to the End: The Case o f Isabel Vane,” Victorian Studies 19 (1976): 331.

11 O f the construction o f the “aristocratic bourgeoisie” in Victorian England, Elizabeth Langland writes, “The middling classes did not ape the econom ic practices o f upper-class life, but, afflicted by status anxiety, set out to master its signifying practices.” Nobody’s Angels, 26. Kaplan writes, “The novel shows that the only class capable o f the correct balance be-tween desire and its release is the middle class” (Motherhood and Representation, 89). But Barbara has to learn “balance” from watching Isabel, and from losing her ow n at a significant moment.

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for instance, she deliberately overdresses for a recital by Kane, the music master, in order to show “ that I th ink the poo r m an’s concert w orth going to, and w orth dressing for” (63). It is as if, in W ood’s estim ation, Isabel can-n o t fill the role o f the liberal subject because she is unable to detach her-self from her ow n spectacular class identity: she cannot, as she will soon have to, “lose” her self. Exhibiting sympathy, Isabel also displays her ability to m anipulate self-display and her awareness o f its consequences: “ I feared it m ight be though t I had put them on to look fine,” she says elsewhere o f some diam onds she has chosen no t to w ear (12).12

Thus despite W ood’s evident valuing o f Isabel’s feeling for Kane, the novel— as if rehearsing a characteristically middle-class response to this aristocratic gesture— expresses ambivalence about her m ode o f expressing it. A nd that ambivalence is reinforced w hen , sum m oned in all her finery from the concert to her father’s sickbed, she refuses to pay attention to that same dress. H ow ever awkward it w ould be to change costumes for her fa-th e r’s death, she is nevertheless found to be inappropriately dressed for the occasion. T he episode suggests the difficulty, for the aristocratic Isabel, o f w earing the virtue she is condem ned to lose; hard as she may try, she can never strike the correct balance betw een inner value and external display. For she cannot cease being on display: though her impulse in each instance is a sympathy o f w hich W ood evidently approves, her unavoidable visibil-ity suggests (and the novel continues to dem onstrate) that the aristocratic heroine cannot truly sympathize because she cannot help bu t make a spec-tacle o f herself: she cannot accurately read, no r can she be quietly absorbed into, the scenarios in w hich she finds herself. (And, indeed, the spectacle o f degradation Isabel em bodies as M adam e Vine reproduces Isabel Vane’s subjection to the relentless middle-class gaze— a gaze literally reproduced w hen , toward the end o f the century, the novel was transform ed into th e-ater.) O nly middle-class identity, the novel’s ideology suggests, w ith its val-orization o f inwardness and in tu ition o f the proper balance betw een feel-ing and its manifestations, is sufficiently m obile, sufficiently flexible, and— as its m etaphorical figuration in the theater audience suggests, sufficiently invisible— for the proper exercise o f sympathy.

12 Elaine Hadley links Isabel’s benevolent desire to display herself to her aristocratic identity. Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800-1885 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 170.

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This episode also marks gender differences in sympathy’s m ode o f oper-ations. T he novel’s critique o f Isabel’s attem pt to assist Kane designates the personal gesture as fem inine and self-indulgent, well in ten tioned but insufficiently considered. This leaves room for the dispassionate, “profes-sional” sympathy displayed in Carlyle’s behind-the-scenes assistance to Barbara s b ro ther James— and, presumably, in his later political life. W hen Isabel “mistakes” meetings betw een Barbara and Carlyle for love scenes, she is o f course hardly mistaken; in these scenes, Carlyle’s cool, rational business m ode— ostensibly just a convenient cover for discussing how to help James— develops as the novel’s alternative to Isabel’s overheated and unpredictable em otion. In this way, as in its later evocation o f mass sympa-thy in the theater, East Lynne distinguishes a practical, masculine sympathy from an ostentatious and im practical— if also admirable— fem inine one.

T he novel valorizes Barbara’s self-presentation over Isabel’s. B ut it does so in a m anner that m erely replaces the latter w ith the form er as the novel’s glamorous center. A nd in this replacem ent, an aristocratic “ethos o f visi-b ility” is adapted to and seamlessly m erged w ith the visual m odality o f the V ictorian marketplace, the V ictorian bourgeois hom e positioned, in A ndrew M iller’s succinct characterization o f the effects o f V ictorian com -m odity culture, “behind glass.” Barbara’s spectacularized hom e em bodies w hat Thom as R ichards has called “capitalist representation,” and w hat, for Jürgen H aberm as, marks a hollow ing ou t o f the private sphere, an “illu-sion o f bourgeois privacy” in w hich the hom e in effect becom es an ad-vertisem ent for a fo rm o f intim acy in the process o f being displaced by popular culture. T he value o f West Lynne’s domesticity, then, is located in Isabel’s new ly altered perception, and in ideological perception in general as it projects value onto everyday life.13

East Lynne allegorizes a social shift: the replacem ent o f Isabel and her father by Carlyle and Barbara signals the replacem ent o f the aristocracy by

13 Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, 13; Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: M IT Press, 1994), 161; Andrew Miller, Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Hadley writes that East Lynne “projects its vision o f a traditional social order and adheres to its ethos o f visibility even as the novel celebrates

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the professional m iddle class, and the novels representation o f bourgeois life is inseparable from its project o f engendering desire for that life. A nd replacing the aristocracy w ith the m iddle class means, for W ood, substi-tu ting the one for the o ther as the object o f the readers desirous gaze. Thus w hile in the novels first half the m iddle class envies the aristocracy, in its second the aristocracy is pu t in the position o f envying the m iddle class, the fo rm ers characteristically heightened sensibility and em otional susceptibility given over to the incitem ent o f middle-class desire. T he novel’s idealization o f the m iddle class is thus rendered as a function o f Isabel’s gaze: if we begin by gazing at Isabel, we end by gazing— through and w ith Isabel— at Barbara. A nd as that gaze shifts from one w om an to another and one class to another, the bourgeoisie seems less to replace the aristocracy than to becom e it. (O nce she has becom e an expert at the bourgeois econom ics o f feeling and its expression, Barbara exemplifies w hat N ancy A rm strong calls— referring to an am biguously coded com -bination o f character regulation and external display— “middle-class aris-tocracy.”)14 In East Lynne, spectacle, bo th naturalized and psychologized through Isabel’s gaze, is identified w ith bo th aristocratic excess and an ide-alized middle-class domesticity. Even w hen the scenes Isabel witnesses seem to speak o f no th ing bu t surface, then— o f the shallowness, for in -stance, o f Barbara’s m anagerial m othering— the intensity w ith w hich they are visualized figures the intensity o f Isabel’s longing and invites readerly longing as well. Indeed, the novel’s pictures o f East L ynne’s dom esticity exist chiefly as m etonym s for Isabel’s desire. A nd that desire, in tu rn , sug-gests the inescapably representational status o f V ictorian middle-class do-mesticity: the way its successful achievem ent is always in question. (And always in process: the necessity for active household m aintenance— w hich goes largely unseen— reflects the perpetual identity-m aintenance o f m id-dle-class consciousness, as it w orks tow ard a never-to -be-a tta ined ideal. “W e never know the full value o f a th ing until we lose it,” says W ood’s narrator, the “un til” im plying the inevitability o f loss.) As the novel struc-

what we now recognize as the bourgeois virtues o f modesty and prudence.” Melodramatic Tactics, 169.

14 In connection with Austen s novels, Armstrong describes the “middle-class aristoc-racy” as a formation that links middle-class moral and economic codes with aristocratic “nuances o f emotion and ethical refinements.” Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (N ew York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 160.

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tures its representations, the reader w ho identifies w ith Isabel, like Isabel herself, remains hopelessly identified w ith the “pictures” she longs to in -habit.

W hereas early in the novel Isabels perceptions are isolated, defined as excessive and overw rought, after her fall readers share her vision, w itness-ing Barbara’s life th rough lenses that locate desire for bourgeois life in an overly sensitive aristocratic body— the body offered to readers for their sympathy and iden tification .15 H ere is Isabel being taken th rough East Lynne for the first time:

O n she followed, her heart palpitating: past the rooms that used to be hers, along the corridor, towards the second staircase. The doors o f her old bed and dressing-rooms stood open, and she glanced in w ith a yearn-ing look. No, never more, never more could they be hers: she had put them from her by her own free act and deed. N o t less comfortable did they look now, than in former days; but they had passed into another’s occupancy. The fire threw its blaze on the furniture: there were the little ornaments on the large dressing table, as they used to be in her time, and the cut glass o f the crystal essence bottles was glittering in the fire-light. O n the sofa lay a shawl and a book, and on the bed a silk dress, as if thrown there after being taken off. (336)

Desire produces a description already framed, by bo th Isabels spectacles and the doorway th rough w hich she glances; it produces a path o f glitter-ing objects for the eye to trace, and ultim ately a place— the discarded dress— w ith w hich bo th Isabel and the novels female readers are invited to identify, and into w hich they may, imaginatively, insert themselves. As M rs. Carlyle, Barbara becom es visible in the visual details Isabel glimpses. A nd th roughout the novel’s latter half, the lives o f Barbara and Carlyle—

15 John Kucich argues that East Lynne “is centrally concerned with middle-class appre-hensions about its rising political and econom ic fortunes, and the way those fortunes had fragmented its ow n moral makeup.” The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 161-62. For Kucich, the figure o f the professional resolves tensions between middle-class and aristocratic values. In my view, Isabel’s unstable identity, and in particular her governess disguise, perform similar “resolutions,” suggesting middle-class ideology’s simultaneous, contradictory reliance on both stable moral truths and fluid identity boundaries.

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especially that o f Barbara, w hose desires, am ply described earlier, seem now to have been fulfilled— similarly appear as im age and spectacle. Isabel’s vision overlays w hat she sees w ith painful intensity, perhaps, we are told, distorting it. Thus “inexpressibly m ore beautiful looked Barbara than Lady Isabel had ever seen her— or else she fancied it” (339). B ut w here the “or else” m ight suggest a perception w eakened or at least called into ques-tion by an acknow ledgm ent o f feeling’s effect on perception, here it also seems to define a m ode o f seeing that, drenched in longing, expresses a m ore profound tru th than any objective account could. Collapsing Isabel’s consciousness in to its ow n representational strategies, the novel general-izes her perception, as if to acknow ledge that the expression o f ideologi-cal truths requires a certain distortion. East Lynne gives middle-class life bo th specular and spectacular fo rm by fram ing it th rough the eyes o f an observer w hose life has becom e, W ood puts it, “as one long scene o f m or-tal agony” ($16). Like “A Christm as Carol,” the novel repeatedly— and re-lentlessly— positions readers, along w ith Isabel, outside the hom e, staging w indow -scenes that set a brilliantly lit East Lynne against a dark back-ground: “ In one o f the com fortable sitting-room s o f East Lynne sat M r. Carlyle and his sister one inclem ent January night. T he w arm , blazing fire, the handsom e carpet on w hich it flickered, the exceedingly com fortable arrangem ent o f the furniture o f the room altogether, and the light o f the chandelier w hich fell on all, presented a picture o f hom e peace, though it may no t have deserved the nam e o f luxu ry” (284). (Scenes show ing Barbara and Carlyle are usually fram ed through Isabel’s eyes: “Lights were m oving in the w indow s, it looked gay and cheerful, a contrast to h e r” [335])- T he novel’s readers, positioned along w ith Isabel as targets o f these representations, are invited to perceive themselves as similarly dispossessed, and Isabel’s distance from her “ow n” experience is thus inscribed as a di-vision w ith in bourgeois life itself: as the insurm ountable bu t inevitable dis-tance betw een the middle-class wife and the “scenes” in w hich she lives.

These pictures o f idealized domesticity capture the tension betw een per-m anence and transience that marks the professional m iddle class’s “inheri-tance” o f aristocratic property, its attem pted appropriation o f aristocratic signifiers. For despite the sale o f the house, despite the changes o f master and mistress, everything— from the fire to the “little ornam ents on the dressing table”— seems to Isabel “as they used to be in her time.” O ne m ight th ink that a new mistress w ould have chosen new ornam ents, o r that the

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“crystal essence bo ttles . . . glittering in the fire-light” m ight now be dif-ferent ones. B ut here every detail, including and perhaps especially the dress lying on the bed, tells readers that w hat is susceptible to change is no t the house bu t its occupants, particularly its mistress. D escribing w hat, in her view, constituted the moral misguidance o f sympathy for Isabel, M argaret O liphant w rote that “w hen she [Isabel] returns to her hom e under the guise o f the poor governess, there is no t a reader w ho does no t feel disposed to tu rn her virtuous successor to the door, and to reinstate the suffering hero-ine, to the glorious confusion o f all morality.”16 For O liphant, sympathy for Isabel takes the form o f a reader’s wish for her reinstatement, into the house, the ornam ents, the dress; w hat is rejected is no t the place and no t even the husband, but the o ther wom an, w ho becom es— as any reader m ight imag-ine herself—just another tem porary occupant (“as if throw n there after being taken o f f ’). Indeed, given the perm anence accorded to domestic ob-jects here— even to the fire that, it seems, is always burning— this picture gives female readers a rather tenuous hold on their bourgeois paradises. Sympathizing w ith Isabel means sympathizing w ith the place in w hich she wants to insert herself, and w ith her desire to do so. (W ood stresses every-w here the identification betw een the two w om en; Barbara is w hat Isabel m ight have been; Isabel “almost regarded Mr. Carlyle as her husband” [497] [as, indeed, he is]. Emphasizing the reversibility o f their positions, the novel makes clear the precedence accorded social identity: bo th Isabel and Barbara long to be, and identify w ith, the nam e “Mrs. Carlyle.”)17

Barbara’s and Isabel’s gazes im bricate class desire and fem inine envy; bo th define middle-class feminine consciousness as a condition o f being inhab-

16 Oliphant, “Novels,” 170.17 Indeed, the idea o f arousing envy, and o f the attractiveness o f the picture she would

make, play no small role in Barbaras desire to be Mrs. Carlyle:“She saw herself, in antici-pation, the wife o f Mr. Carlyle, the envied, thrice envied o f all West Lynne; for, like as he was the dearest on earth to her heart, so was he the greatest match in the neighborhood around. N ot a mother but coveted him for her child; not a daughter but would have said ‘Yes, and thank you’ to an offer from the attractive Mr. Carlyle” (25).

Emphasis on the permanence o f the house or name, rather than the individual w ho hap-pens to inhabit it at the moment, is the aristocracy’s traditional m ode o f asserting power through continuity. In the middle-class version, the individual is always in the process o f attempting to assert the stability the aristocrat took for granted.

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ited by and dependent on the class-inflected images o f others. Seeing Isabel’s and Carlyle’s marriage from the inside, readers learn o f the effects o f “ time and custom ” on Carlyle, whose “demonstrative affection, shown so greatly for her in the first twelve m onths or so o f their m arried life, had sub-sided into calmness__ D o we not all,” W ood writes, “becom e indifferentto our toys w hen we hold them securely in possession?” (166). B ut such indifference never manifests itself in the m arriage o f Barbara and Carlyle. For while readers are invited to participate in the dissatisfactions o f various female characters at various points, for instance— to see through Barbara’s “covetous eyes,” or to hear about Isabel’s jealousy o f Barbara and uncertainty about her ow n marriage— the w om an w ho has achieved the novel’s ideal position seems to have no interiority once she achieves it. This marriage is an idealized and nostalgic construction whose value Barbara perceives only because, living bo th literally and figuratively w ith Isabel’s shadow hovering at her side, she does no t fully possess it; in the novel’s terms, it can be per-ceived as valuable only because (and this is in keeping w ith many critical as-sessments o f Barbara’s character) no one really inhabits it.

A nd yet W ood also suggests that w hat appears as distortion or m agnification in East Lynne s dom esticity is no t only the product o f the novel’s representations or o f Isabel’s gaze: the staged quality o f the dom es-tic life Isabel observes in the Carlyle hom e is, we learn, inextricable from that h o m e’s successful functioning. Barbara offers her governess and East Lynne's readers the following lesson in child rearing:

“Now, what I trust I shall never give up to another, will be the training of my children,” pursued Barbara. “Let the offices, properly belonging to a nurse, be perform ed by the nurse — let her have the trouble o f the chil-dren, their noise, their romping__ But I hope I shall never fail to gathermy children round me daily, at stated periods, for higher purposes: to in-stil into them Christian and moral duties; to strive to teach them how best to fulfill the obligations o f life. This is a m other’s task — a child should never hear aught from its m other’s lips but persuasive gentleness; and this fcecomes impossible, if she is very much w ith her children.”

Lady Isabel silently assented. Mrs. Carlyle’s views were correct. (341)

East Lynne is best know n for its affirmation o f natural m aternal feeling: for Isabel’s longing for her children, and (in the theatrical versions) the

n o Fear o f Falling

deathbed m elodram a o f recognition. B ut w hat Isabel approves here is no t nature, bu t rather a theatricality fully ingrained in ordinary life, and m ade possible by a division betw een the m o th er’s em otional and the governess’s physical labor: m o therhood in this account is the effect o f an image m ak-ing orchestrated by the m other herself. This explanation o f the m achin-ery w hereby middle-class dom esticity produces itself as ideology— w hat Jo h n K ucich calls “professional m otherhood ,” and w hat constitutes the underlying condition for Joseph Litvak’s description o f the hom e as a stage set (see below )— m ight, like the representational excesses o f the passage discussed earlier, be said to undercu t the novel’s idealizations. W hether or no t W ood herself agrees w ith Barbara’s words, that is, Isabel herself u n -equivocally endorses a life defined as representation and a m o therhood that consists o f know ing how to play the part.18 Indeed, in a form ulation that resolves the confusing tension betw een w hat appears to be W ood’s si-m ultaneous approval and disapproval o f Barbara’s m ethods, Isabel may be said to assent n o t necessarily to Barbara’s exact m ethods bu t rather to her dem onstrations o f the value o f representation: to an ideal o f ideological representation she herself, as aristocrat o r as governess, can only clumsily manage. In o ther words, the novel registers here a perverse adm iration for the emptiness o f its dom estic images, for the exposure o f the bourgeois hom e as theater— and for the way in w hich, to a desiring if am bivalent spectator (and these images project no o ther kind) the scenes o f Barbara’s m arriage celebrate the impossible cancellation o f the distance betw een self and im age so relentlessly inscribed in Isabel’s experience.

Litvak describes the representational excess o f East Lynne's dom esticity as the novel’s transform ation o f dom estic space in to “one big stage set” (138). O f W ood’s theatricalization o f the hom e, he writes: “ If the narrative can reinforce ‘hom e con tro l’ only by casting the hom e itself in an en - thrallingly theatrical light, the spectacle thus staged may be com prom ising in m ore ways than one. To reframe the hom e as a desirable site, glittering w ith crystal and silk, is to make it all the m ore intelligible as a site o f de-sire” (140). W ood’s novel sketches the V ictorian h o m e’s ow n fall into rep-resentation— a fall that reveals, by v irtue o f the h o m e’s reframing, the

18 Kucich argues that W ood endorses neither version o f m otherhood on display here (Power of Lies, 193).

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weakness o f the “ controls” im agined therein. Similarly, suggesting that the correct practice o f m o therhood is indistinguishable from the m o th ers good image, and reconfiguring that im age in her ow n novels spectacular closure, W ood at once exposes spectacle’s w orkings and exploits its pow er as a m echanism for the transmission o f bourgeois ideology.

A nd indeed, a fall in to representation is precisely w hat Isabel’s embour-geoisement— the discovery o f her “natural” m aternal feeling— requires. For if Isabel’s spectacles give readers and audiences o f East Lynne som ething to look through, they also give readers and audiences som ething to look at: seeing w hat Isabel sees, readers (and o f course spectators) also find their attention relentlessly directed toward the figure cut by Isabel herself. O n the one hand, East Lynne inscribes middle-class values on a body w hose aristocratic com plexion gives that inscription its ideological force; Isabel’s assent to Barbara’s idea o f m o therhood is reinforced by the pain inflicted on her oversensitive aristocratic body. B ut on the other, her railway acci-dent, like the clothing and eyewear w ith w hich she enhances her disguise, transform s her bo d y ’s class markers; Isabel’s com ing to bourgeois con -sciousness— m ore precisely, the v io lent infliction o f middle-class con -sciousness upon her— is signaled by a confusion o f the signs o f class iden-tity, an exposure o f that consciousness’s ow n vexed identifications.

T h e novel frequently points tow ard Isabel’s essential self: w ith o u t her eyeglasses, w e are told, she is dangerously identifiable (M adame V ine re-sembles her, Miss C orny remarks at one po int, “ especially in the eyes” [392]). Shielding her identity, the spectacles po in t toward its irreducibility. B u t the gaps the glasses also dem arcate— betw een Isabel and her sur-roundings, betw een her vision before and after her fall, and betw een the person beh ind them and the picture she presents to those w ho view her— focus atten tion on the reconstruction o f her body and her experience. Indeed, Isabel’s disguise, like her earlier skill at m anipulating her appear-ance (for w hich her deform ation seems an appropriate punishm ent), h igh-lights her identity as a creature o f representations, and opens up the same cultural space for identifying w ith representation that the novel itself does. C apturing the tension betw een claims to nature, on the one hand, and the constructedness o f social identity, on the other, that characterized the V ictorian m iddle class, disguise in East Lynne registers the same tension as disguise in R u th : it points toward natural identity at the same tim e that it

i i 2 Fear o f Falling

signifies a distance from it, a fall in to a bourgeois w orld o f representation.19 W ith her num erous and am biguous class signifiers, and her allegiances to ostensibly natural feeling as well as to a w orld o f artifice and disguise, Isabel em bodies the contradictions o f V ictorian middle-class identity.

A nd she also illustrates, in exem plary fashion, the construction o f the sym pathetic object. For in taking on the governess’s disguise, Isabel w ill-ingly becom es a m etaphor for a self seen prim arily as spectacle (and the voluntary nature o f her self-abnegation is im portant). E n tering in to her husband’s household service, she n o t only accepts bu t actively assists in the construction o f her ow n image as the dom inant ideology w ould construct it. In doing so, she reveals the indistinguishability o f the object o f degra-dation from the object o f sympathy. As Isabel reconstructs her body, en-hancing the deform ation w rought by her railway injury— and as she be-com es the agent o f her ow n suffering, willfully en tering into service in the Carlyle household— she emerges as a paradigmatic sym pathetic spec-tacle, no t only accepting bu t actively em bracing the punishm ent her ac-tions w ould suggest to her V ictorian readers. A nd the overdeterm ined na-ture o f her spectacularity registers her as an object o f sympathy par excellence as well, since spectacle itself—in the contex t o f V ictorian sensa-tion fiction and theater— is a signifier o f degradation, rem iniscent o f other, “cheap” entertainm ents in w hich the visual predom inates. C onstructing herself as a middle-class fantasy o f degradation and decline, Isabel is, again in an exem plary m anner, a figure about w h o m it feels good— indeed, virtuous— to feel bad. R eaderly sympathy in East Lynne is thus inseparable from the taking o f som e pleasure in her punishm ent. Fashioning Isabel’s character as a series o f images that foreground iden-tity ’s social and cultural configuration, the novel reveals the object o f sym-pathy to be a projection o f the dom inant culture’s gaze, and sympathy for Isabel to be inseparable from sympathy against her.

By the end o f the novel, outcast, w earing victim s’ clothing, deprived o f her children, and physically as well as em otionally scarred, Isabel in all her discom fort fits com fortably in to the category o f sym pathetic object.

19 For a reading that stresses the multiplicity and instability o f Isabels identity, see Nina Auerbach, Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 22. O n construction o f a myth o f middle-class identity, see especially Samuel Smiles, Self-Help (London, 1859).

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Ostensibly sym pathetic because no one sees or recognizes her, she is so garishly appointed as v ictim — as if she were w earing a sign— that she is the inescapable object o f everyone’s gaze. C lum sily dropping her eye-glasses, a device that in its m ost banal fo rm calls atten tion to the eyes it conceals, Isabel works at shattering the illusion o f her false identity as as-siduously as any stage actress w ishing to leave a distinct m ark on the role. A nd the awkwardness— w hat m ight be called the staginess— o f her dis-guise functions in the same way her spectacles do: po in ting tow ard the “ tru e ” self, it sim ultaneously suggests the painful self-consciousness o f a self-constructed identity U ndernea th the disguise, say the glasses, lie true iden tity and true w orth— not incidentally, in aristocratic fo rm — if only som eone will recognize them . Indeed Isabel’s painful self-consciousness exposes a yearning for recognition that (certainly according to Jane Eyre) underlies the governess’s stereotypically self-effacing facade. In its final, spectacular m om ents, East Lynne affirms a bourgeois publicization o f sup-posedly private values, as if true feeling can only be true w hen ratified by the public gaze.

Isabel’s sexual fall leads to, bu t also displaces, a class saga in w hich the aristocratic Isabel, confident in her ability to control the term s o f her self-representation, is refashioned as M adam e Vine, a figure self-alienated bu t also and som ehow sim ultaneously at one w ith herself. T he governess dis-guise thus effects a kind o f solution to the claims m ade by East Lynne, and by V ictorian middle-class culture, to b o th stable m oral values and fluid identity boundaries: Isabel is bo th a victim o f disguise (deform ed by the accident) as well as the m anipulator o f her ow n image. Signifying the kind o f fate that awaits those w ho violate bourgeois morality, the disguise marks her as having paid, and continuing to pay, for her behavior; i f Isabel ap-pears to becom e aware o f her tragic mistake, simply by v irtue o f the pow er righ t th inking has over evil, she is also m ade to feel and to represent— in her bodily injuries, the loss o f her child, and the painful self-consciousness she experiences as governess— how inescapably she has left happiness be-hind. Indeed, w ith the accident (as w ith the hard labor to w hich the novel gleefully sentences Levison) Isabel is m ade to bear the burden o f m iddle- class ressentiment; her aristocratic sensibility has bourgeois verities violently impressed upon it. In Isabel, a figure o f aristocratic ease experiences her class’s decline in physical and em otional term s as her ow n personal narra-tive.

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B ut the novels sacralization o f Isabel as m other distracts from and ulti-mately overshadows the class drama her various identities enact; class con-fusion gives way to phantasmatic unanim ity in the novels insistent claims for m aternal feeling. Emphasis on the priority and passion o f that feeling conceals the m ore socially com plex division o f labor the novel also exposes: the way the role o f m other is created here by two actors, one acknowledged and the o ther not. As Barbara’s lesson in m otherhood suggests, M adam e Vine is the repressed “o ther” o f this m aternal scene— the figure w ho, ab-sorbing children’s (and readers’) anger, makes idealization o f the m other possible. T he unrecognized m other, W ood’s plot suggests, is no t just Isabel Vane but rather the V ictorian governess. B ut if for the V ictorian m iddle classes m otherhood required m ore than one player, sympathy w ith Isabel’s m aternal feeling sweeps aside that class reality. B ehind Isabel’s disguise read-ers are m eant to perceive true m aternal feeling— feeling belonging to a m other significantly no t allowed to live, as if the intensity o f her feeling ren-ders her unsuited to the w orld o f representations that, if she did live, she w ould have to inhabit. A nd the placelessness o f Isabel’s feeling— the novel’s refusal to install the true m other in her true hom e— contributes to its pe-culiar power. For in the social context in w hich the novel was translated into theater, Isabel’s homelessness corresponds to the displacement o f the bourgeois hom e itself: the removal o f domestic feeling to the public sphere.

Sympathy generally entails an attenuation o f self in a spectator’s disturb-ing identification w ith the marginal. In the shift from Vane to Vine, one marginal self becom es another in a transform ation that, characteristically, elides the middle. Isabel Vane the aristocrat is favored, elite, b u t in decline; M adam e V ine the governess w ould, in another novel and by o ther means, be the predictable result o f that decline. Sympathy here involves the cre-ation o f a self positioned on the margins, yet occupying a place at the cen-ter, o f the consciousnesses o f the m iddle classes w ho, policing the borders o f their cultural centrality, find themselves preoccupied w ith— and im ag-ining the spaces they construct invaded by— the very characters they w ould exclude. (T hough Isabel wears her governess disguise on the o u t-side, sympathy w ith her appeals to the governess “w ith in ” W ood’s female readers: the ever present middle-class anxiety about degradation and de-cline.) T he novels I have discussed sometim es literalize the invasion: Isabel,

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like R u th , penetrates the sanctified boundaries o f the bourgeois hom e, w hile in M adam e V ine the body the m iddle class wishes to see as foreign to that hom e is rew ritten as, literally, a foreign body. A nd in a scenario that captures the way im aginative space legitimates, and displaces, an increas-ingly segregated physical space, theater audiences w atching stage adapta-tions o f East Lynne du ring the latter decades o f the n ine teen th cen tury w ould— by feeling for a character previously excluded from middle-class sympathies— have expanded their em otional horizons as they occupied an increasingly exclusive space: one m ore and m ore hostile to any bu t the re-spectable m iddle classes.20

East Lynnes hom e-as-stage-set sets the scene for the novel’s actual trans-form ation into a w ork o f theater at the precise historical m om ent w hen the theater was being reconfigured in the im age o f the middle-class hom e. T he novel’s suitability for stage adaptation has already been noted; apart from scenes and dialogue m odeled on stage m elodram a, its voyeuristic structure duplicates the relation betw een theater audience and stage. A nd presenting hom e as im age and Isabel as envious looker-on , the novel fore-grounds the la te -n ine teen th -cen tu ry theate r’s them atics o f exclusion (uEast Lynnes central em otion,” w rites Sally M itche ll,“is the pain o f ex-clusion”).21 T h e period saw the transform ation o f the English theate r’s class associations: theaters were restructured to make bo th attendance and enjoym ent m ore difficult for m em bers o f the lower / w orking classes, and the ir surrounding areas were similarly (in Russell Jackson’s term ) “ cleansed.” By the 1880s, Jackson w rites, theater “had established itself as a rational en terta inm ent for the m iddle and upper classes.”22 Thus the p u -tative expansion o f audience sympathy signaled by a willingness (indeed an eagerness, suggestive o f a cohesiveness founded as m uch on class re-sentm ent as on sympathy) to sympathize w ith Isabel Vane was accom pa-

20 The novel was first dramatized in 1863 and “almost constantly acted” in subsequent years (Mitchell, introduction to East Lynne, x iii-iv). Adeline Sergeant writes o f this sup-posed extension o f sympathy in modern life in Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1897), 182-83.

21 Mitchell, introduction to East Lynne, xvi.22 Jackson describes these changes in Victorian Theatre (London: A. & C. Black, 1989).

Aside from “smaller, more comfortably appointed and socially exclusive theatres,” he de-scribes “such ‘cleansing’ as Macready’s banishing o f prostitutes from the precincts o f Drury Lane. . . made it a safer place for the middle class” (11-12).

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nied by a contraction o f the place in w hich that sympathy was to be felt, as the new ly intim ate and com fortable theater grew to resemble the hom e it (at least in the case o f East Lynne) depicted. Exclusion from the theater took a subtle form , however, affecting no t so m uch m em bers o f a partic-ular class as their theatergoing culture; low er- o r working-class audiences were no t elim inated bu t rather were conscripted into an im agined m id-dle-class solidarity. As theaters gained in “legitimacy,” so too, it seems, did their audiences participate in and reinforce a unanim ity o f feeling and be-havior: despite being literally relegated to the margins, working-class au-dience m em bers enthusiastically enforced the new theate r’s codes and conventions.23 T h e diffuse gaze o f the theater audience em bodies the fictional gaze o f the dom inant culture.

As public versions o f private space, then, bo th play and theater suggest w hat H aberm as calls “ the floodlit privacy o f the new [bourgeois] sphere . . . [an] externalization o f w hat is declared to be the inner life” that reflects consum er culture’s dom ination o f family life and leisure tim e as it disseminates and universalizes images o f cultural value.24 T he theater be-comes, in effect, an im aginary hom e, redeem ing Isabel’s solitary spectator- ship by binding its spectators together as consum ers and producers o f an em otional surplus. For despite the story’s adjurations tow ard em otional balance, the extravagant sympathy East Lynne evokes is a luxury all can afford. East Lynne's m ost im portan t scene o f sympathy, then, occurs n o t in the novel o r on the stage bu t rather in readers and audiences, for w hom Isabel serves less as an object than as an occasion for (to adapt R aym ond W illiam s’s phrase) a middle-class structuring o f feeling.

Sally S huttlew orth argues that sympathy for Isabel undercuts East Lynnes ideological prescriptions: readerly sympathy for Isabel’s passion, she

23 “Numerous individuals come literally together— assemble— in the space the theater furnishes in order to confront one and the same representation. It is as if the lines o f sight that connect them to a com m on object also unite them in a com m on identification.” David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, Culture and the State (London: Routledge, 1998), 56. Jackson points out that working-class audiences were often “more likely than others to insist on the strict observance o f conventional morality and decorous behavior in plays” ( Victorian Theatre, 13). I cannot say here— if it is possible to say at all— to what extent this insistence derives from the influence o f middle-class ideology and to what extent it belongs to working-class culture, i f indeed cultures are so easily distinguishable from one another.

24 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 156-57.

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claims, subverts the novels m oral condem nation .25 B u t the injured, dis-guised Isabel is an im age o f the body V ictorian sympathy produced for its ow n consum ption. Sympathy for Isabel requires the m onstrosity and de-form ity it seems to lam ent; rather than subverting the novel’s condem na-tion o f Isabel, sympathy is coterm inous w ith it. T he narrative o f Isabel’s punishm ent and decline constitutes the cultural narrative o f sympathy for her: it is the narrative that invites readers to im agine themselves in her place. In a m anner that recalls R e n é G irard’s accounts o f sacrifice, Isabel seems to fall victim to her ow n sensibility and susceptibility: the violence inflicted upon her, ostensibly caused by no one bu t herself, purges her from the com m unity, w hich then establishes its innocence by producing around her death a spectacle o f em otional unanim ity and class cohesion (a perform ance o f cohesion brought to life, I have suggested, by the novel’s translation into theater). Sympathy constructs an im agined class solidarity in w hich a phantasm atic bourgeois in terio r makes a hom e for an equally phantasm atic bourgeois interiority. “T he leisure activities o f the culture-consum ing public,” w rites H aberm as, “themselves take place w ith in a so-cial climate, and they do no t require any further discussions.”26

Assenting to her appropriate role and its generic consequences w ith in the drama o f bourgeois representation, Isabel does no t die so m uch as fade; in keeping w ith the novel’s phantasm agoria o f vision and value, she d im in-ishes in color and strength as a direct result o f the “incessant irrita tion on the m ind” (472) to w hich she has subjected herself, literalizing in her body the distance from value that becom es the defining feature o f her experi-ence. W hile Barbara, after her initial outburst o f affection for M r. Carlyle, learned to keep her feelings to herself, Isabel chafes against that restriction; as her response to Barbara s narrative shows, she is always on the verge o f giving herself away. A nd her “ rebellion” against her situation, in the novel’s econom ic term s, “cost[s] her her life.” (In fact, the entire second half o f the novel is described as a k ind o f death: the effect o f the accident

25 Shuttleworth, “D em onic Mothers: Ideologies o f Bourgeois M otherhood in the M id- Victorian Era,” in Rewriting the Victorians, ed. Linda Shires (N ew York: Routledge, 1992), 3

26 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 163.

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is “little less than death itself” [270]; her experience since her return to East Lynne is “as one long scene o f m ortal agony.” As in “A Christm as Carol,” w here the idea o f Scrooge s death threatens h im w ith irrevocable absence from the scenes o f culturally sanctioned delight he witnesses, Isabel’s death is identified w ith a spectatorial position that marks her as hopelessly identified w ith , yet forever excluded from, the scenes W ood identifies no t ju st w ith health bu t w ith life.

P a r t I I I

The Aesthetics

of Cultural Identity

5Consenting to the Fact: Body; Nation, and Identity in Daniel Deronda

W hen, in G eorge E lio ts Daniel Deronda (1876), the aged Jew M ordecai seeks a m an to fulfill his nationalist and religious ideals, he fash-ions the m ental equivalent o f w hat today w ould be called a personal ad. A cting on w hat E liot describes as “a m ature spiritual need akin to the boy’s and girl’s p ic turing o f the future beloved,” 1 M ordecai seeks the im age o f his protégé th roughou t the w orld and, specifically, in the m useum :

H e imagined a man who would have all the elements necessary for sym-pathy with him, but in an em bodiment unlike his own: he must be a Jew, intellectually cultured, morally fervid . .. but his face and frame must be beautiful and strong, he must have been used to all the refinements o f so-cial life, his voice must flow with a full and easy current, his circumstances be free from sordid need: he must glorify the possibilities o f the Jew, not sit and wander as Mordecai did, bearing the stamp o f his people amid the signs o f poverty and waning breath. Sensitive to physical characteristics, he had, both abroad and in England, looked at pictures as well as men, and in a vacant hour he had sometimes lingered in the National Gallery

1 George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1986), 531. Subsequent references included in text.

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in search of paintings which might feed his hopefulness with grave and noble types of the human form, such as might well belong to men of his own race. (529)

“H e must be a Je w .. . but.” The right man for the job will be the char-acter the novel calls the “refined Jew ”— the Jew whose background, edu-cation, and physical features “might well belong to men o f his own race,” or— this passage strongly suggests— might just as well not. M ordecai’s m u-seum search recalls Eliot’s use o f family portraits to describe Deronda’s ap-pearance: “He was handsomer than any o f them, and when he was thir-teen might have served as model for any painter who wanted to image the most memorable o f boys: you could hardly have seen his face thoroughly meeting yours w ithout believing that human creatures had done nobly in times past, and might do more nobly in time to come” (205). Though the absence o f resemblance between D eronda’s features and those o f Sir H ugo’s family tells o f his lack o f blood relation to them, it also seems to tell o f an absence o f relation to any ordinary human family. But the de-scription, giving readers the opportunity to fill in Deronda’s blank features w ith their own designs (imagine for yourself “the most memorable of boys”), is in fact more specific than it appears: the vacancy established by referring the business o f description to “you,” like the vacancy that char-acterizes Eliot’s descriptions o f Deronda, invites the constitution o f a sub-jectivity in effect already constituted— a space to be filled w ith images whose specific referents, hanging on the walls o f the National Gallery, are assumed to be the cultured readers intellectual property.2 As model and, implicitly, copy, Deronda occupies a niche less in a specific family history than in an aesthetic imaginary, as a descendant o f idealized types and por-traits rather than particular individuals.3 Both passages, in fact, exemplify

2 H u g h W item eyer’s discussion o f the artw orks to w hich the novel refers is relevant here, as is his quotation from W. J. H arvey that E liot had “a m ind like the N ational Gallery.” George Eliot and the Visual Arts (N ew Haven:Yale U niversity Press, 1979), 9.

3 For E lio t’s readers, sympathy w ith the individual presum ably lays the groundw ork for sympathy w ith the Jews. By letting readers get to know D eronda as an English gendem an first, and as Jewish only later, E liot attem pts to secure sympathy from English readers w ho then find, belatedly, that they have identified w ith a Jew ish character. Prefacing the revela-tion o f Jew ish identity w ith an exploration o f D eronda’s English self, however, prom otes the association o f Englishness w ith individuality and Jewishness w ith type. E lio t’s strategy

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the novel’s duck-rabbit, n o w -y o u -see -it-n o w -y o u -d o n ’t approach to D eronda’s appearance, evoking stereotypes only to cancel them in their at-tem pts to describe the character w hose distinctive feature will be his abil-ity to do the same: to evoke a type, belong to a group, w ith o u t being con-strained by that m em bership. T h eir convolutions convey the strain o f try ing to represent w hat is, in V ictorian readers’ m ental portra it galleries as in V ictorian novelistic representation in general, an impossibility: the Jew w ho does no t look like one.

As M ordecai wanders through the N ational Gallery, he too becom es a hypothetical object o f speculation: “Some observant persons may rem em -ber his em aciated figure, and dark eyes deep in their sockets, as he stood infront o f a picture__ B ut spectators w ould be likely to th ink o f him as anodd-looking Jew, w ho probably got m oney ou t o f pictures” (529). As at-tem pts to im agine sym pathetic “others,” D aniel and M ordecai figure in E lio t’s im agination, and for each other, as types and relationships to types. B ut E lio t’s use o f the m useum as a setting for these descriptions also puts the idea o f type, as a simplification and aestheticizing o f character, on dis-

is reminiscent o f one criticism o f a liberal idea about how to treat England’s Jewish pop-ulation, namely, the idea that Jews should efface their identities as Jews to win acceptance as individuals. See David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840-1914 (N ew HavenrYale University Press, 1994), 27.

Though she doesn’t discuss the term “noble,” Inderpal Grewal suggests that connections between ideas o f classical form, the whiteness o f white marble, and Englishness might be conveyed by that term. The “valorization o f Greek art,” she points out, “participatfed] in creating an ‘ideal’ English subject, unquestioningly masculine but one w ho was receptive to a ‘moral’ art and w ho immediately recognized the ‘purity’ o f classical forms.” Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 108. Grewal quotes Sir Henry Ellis on the Elgin marbles— “The possession o f this collection has established a national school o f sculpture in our country, founded on the noblest models w hich human art has ever produced”— and refers to the “nobleman [Elgin] to whose exertions the nation is indebted for it [the collection]” (119, quoting Ellis, Elgin and Phigaleian Marbles, 10, 215).

For a similar scenario o f looking for an aesthetically pleasing “norm ” in the museum: in a New York Times Magazine article on plastic surgery, the author asks one Dr. Joseph M. R osen “how a surgeon decides on the shape o f a given altered part.” R osen replies, “I once asked that o f a well-known plastic surgeon I work with, and he told me he went to the Louvre and studies art, and that while he was aware o f many different standards and mea-suring systems, he ultimately decided by what looked right and nice.” Charles Siebert, “The Cuts That Go Deeper,” New York Times Magazine, 7 July 1996, 40.

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play— revealing how, in the m useum as in the novel, issues o f race, like those o f class and gender, are transm uted in to the category o f sensibility or taste.

T he m useum here figures, as it did in the late n ineteen th century and still does today, as a place in w hich artworks are n o t the only things on dis-play: one in w hich visitors, extending their license to look and seeking to b ec o m e spectacles themselves, serve as spectators o f and objects for one another. T h e art gallery in particular, w hose visitors possessed (it was as-sumed) specific know ledge o f the works they had com e to see, provided a “key symbolic site for those perform ances o f ‘distinction’ th rough w hich the cognoscenti differentiate themselves from the masses”— and, the passage cited above also suggests, the non-Jew s differentiate themselves from the Jew s.4 Those spectators “capable o f recognizing and appreciating those works [of art] as such” w ould also “ recognize” that M ordecai’s purpose in the m useum m ust differ from their own; the exam ination to w hich he is subject is part and parcel o f the m useum ’s contribu tion to the observation (in bo th senses) o f distinctions.5 T he N ational Gallery functions here as a version o f the “im agined com m unity” o f the nation as Daniel Deronda finally envisions it, a com m unity in w hich a fantasy o f shared sensibilities produces a heigh tened consciousness o f social and cultural differences.6

M ordecai’s features, “bearing the stamp o f his people,” block the evoca-tion o f sympathy his religious and nationalist plans require. T hey also, for the spectators w ho characterize him , signify the lim ited scope o f his ob -servation: narrowly seeking his object, he em bodies the refusal— projected on the Jews— to participate in the general cultural project o f the nation. For E liot and her hypothetical spectators, the Jew ’s gaze is focused else-w here: on his nation bu t no t on theirs. Lacking the whiteness that signifies a w ide-ranging sympathy (like that o f the novel’s invisible om niscience), M ordecai necessarily lacks w hat M ichael Ragussis calls “ the practical pow er o f the assimilated Jew.”7 D eronda, however, possessing the qualities M ordecai lacks (or m ore accurately, lacking the qualities M ordecai pos-

4 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (N ew York: Routledge, 1995), 11.5 Ibid., 163.6 The term “imagined community” comes from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Com-

munities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).7 Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: aThe fewish Question” and English National

Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 288.

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sesses), possesses that power, and invites the sympathy M ordecai’s project requires. For despite M ordecai’s search for features that suggest “Jewish b ir th ” (531), he seeks a Jew w ho “m ight or m ight n o t” look like one, and E lio t’s narrator describes D eronda largely through references to historical, heroic types and by negation: he is “n o t m ore distinctively oriental than m any a type seen am ong w hat we call the Latin races” (553).

“D iscrim ination” is the te rm Eliot uses in the Philosophers’ C lub chapter (chap. 41) for the ability to distinguish different degrees o f Jewishness in its m em bers— characters w hose features are so m arked that, the narrator re-lates, “even” D eronda, little practiced in this kind o f “discrimination,” can perform it (5 8 1 ). Establishing h im as her inexperienced and impartial ob -server on the scene— “D eronda was well satisfied to get a seat on the op-posite side, w here his general survey o f the party easily included M ordecai”— Eliot supplements his know ledge w ith her own: “In fact, pure English blood (if leech or lancet can furnish us w ith the precise product) did no t declare itself predom inantly in the party at present assembled.” B ut despite skepticism about the idea o f “pure English blood,” the passage pro-ceeds to establish a relationship betw een Jewishness and nationality for each o f the club’s members: “Miller, the broad m a n . . . had at least grand-parents w ho called themselves G erm an, and possibly far-away ancestors w ho de-nied themselves to be Jews; B uchan, the saddler, was Scotch; Pash, the watchmaker, was a small, dark, vivacious, triple-baked Jew; G ideon, the op-tical instrum ent maker, was a Jew o f the red-haired, generous-featured typeeasily passing for Englishm en o f unusually cordial m anners__ O nly threew ould have been discernible everywhere as E nglishm en” (5 8 1 - 8 2 ). This passage establishes Jewish identity, like all “discriminations,” as a m atter o f degree; w hat defines the discerning observer is the ability to perceive the Jewishness nationality conceals.Yet w hile the club m em bers emerge, in dis-cussion as well as through observation, as different “types” o f Jews, E lio t’s emphasis w ith respect to D eronda falls, som ewhat condescendingly, on his gracious ability to participate as one o f the company. It is the task o f m an-ners to make him an equal, that is, because until he encounters M ordecai’s wishful vision, D eronda is the Jew even the m ost discerning o f observers can’t discern: “H e looked around h im w ith the quiet air o f respect habitual

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to him am ong equals, ordered whisky and water, and offered the contents o f his cigar case” (582).8

Indeed, despite Eliot’s disclaimer, “discrimination” is the m ode o f seeing on w hich this novel depends, bo th in its depiction o f Jews said to be recog-nizable as such and in its characterization o f the Jew w ho is not. For though M ordecai s purpose in the m useum may not seem to its regular visitors likely to m atch their own, neither can it be said to differ greatly. Seeking the image o f his “beloved” in a gallery that expresses som ething o f the nature o f be-longing to the nation— as if misunderstanding the m useum s function, but in fact understanding it all too well— M ordecai is also looking to discriminate, to find a cultural type “gathered from his m em ory o f faces seen am ong the Jews o f Holland and Bohemia, and from the paintings w hich revived that m em ory” (531). (Mordecai m ight be considered mistaken for pursuing not w hat the m useum invites its visitors to consider— the abstraction “m an”— but rather an image he hopes will lead him to an actual man.) T hough he and the narrator establish different markers for D eronda s features— the one seeking some signs o f Jewish identity, the other emphasizing the absence o f such signs— both practice a m ode o f observation whose essential quality is a habit o f noting the presence or absence o f “Jewish” features.

T he m useum -goers struck by M ordecai s incongruous presence, these passages invite us to im agine, m ust be the k ind o f discrim inating observers he is; for all M ordecai knows, D eronda him self m ight be am ong them . A ppealing to a consciousness o f social types in those same readers w ho w ould share an im age o f D eronda’s “nobility,” the novel links the m useum -goer’s sensibility no t ju st to M ordecai s bu t to the reader’s as well. For w hat M ordecai does in envisioning his beloved is w hat Eliot does in envisioning M ordecai, w hat D eronda does w hen he imagines the family he dreads discovering is M irah ’s, and w hat D eronda will later counsel G w endolen to do: “ take hold o f your sensibility,” he tells her, “and use it as if it were a faculty, like vision” (509).

W hile the sensibility in question in this passage is fear (Daniel is advis-ing G w endolen to let her conscience be her guide), seeing w ith o n e ’s sen-

8 The ease with which Deronda discriminates suggests that his ability to make himself comfortable is perhaps the result o f the members’ visible difference from him. As Lionel Trilling suggests in “Manners, Morals, and the Novel,” manners allow one to discriminate while seeming not to. The Liberal Imagination (NewYork: Viking, 1950), 206.

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sibility is in fact an excellent description o f the novel’s m oral and aesthetic m ode. For w hen sensibility is a faculty, taste becom es a sense, and in the racial and national contex t Daniel Deronda establishes, discrim ination (or “discernm ent”) signifies no t only the ability to classify according to race, class, and nationality bu t also a visceral response to any or all o f the above. This is w hat it means for D aniel to see w ith his sensibility: “he saw h im -self guided by some official scout in to a dingy street; he entered through a dim doorway, and saw a haw k-eyed w om an, rough headed, and u n -washed, cheapening a hungry girl’s last b it o f fmery; or in som e quarter only the m ore hideous for being smarter, he found him self under the breath o f a young Jew talkative and fam iliar. . . and so on.” Suggestively ending thus, the narrative once m ore allows its readers to fill in the blank; as E liot writes, confident in her readers’ com petence, such images are “the language in w hich we th in k ” (247). A ligning sensibility w ith vision, iden-tifying though t as a system o f images, E liot underscores the ease w ith w hich, in this novel’s cultural context, m oral judgm ents slide into aesthetic ones. In such a context, that is, it is im possible n o t to th ink in images.9

W hile Daniel generally escapes the exam ination to w hich the visibly Jewish are subject, the diffuse features that express his ethical nature— the “many-sidedness” o f his sympathy— establish him as a recognizable cultural type.10 It is not, in other words, that he is an absence, a “nobody,” but that his features are such that they make no difference to a sympathetic reader’s im agination— indeed, the lack o f difference they make is w hat defines that im agination as sympathetic. T he description o f the object o f M ordecai’s search no less than D aniel’s later decision to dedicate him self to “his ow n hereditary people” renders explicit w hat is implicit elsewhere in E lio t’s w ork (and w hat I have argued throughout this book): that sympathy, ostensibly grounded for Eliot in personal know ledge and identification, is predom i-

9 Tellingly, in a passage lauding the working classes for their good behavior when visit-ing the museum, and the museum for its civilizing powers, an 1852 guidebook to the British Museum uses the term “sympathy” to mean “taste”: “Verily this is an age o f progress, and the conviction o f this truth. . . that the sympathies o f the rich and the poor are identical.” Quoted in Grewal, Home and Harem, 124.

10 Possessed o f “a fine person, no eccentricity o f manners, the education o f a gentleman, and a present incom e” (412)— Deronda resembles Conan D oyle’s no-identity capitalist, the man with the twisted lip. Says Ezra Cohen, “I thought you might be the young prin-cipal o f a first-rate firm” (442).

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nantly a m atter o f cultural identification, as the sympathetic self seeks out a particular assemblage o f social and cultural markers w ith w hich to sympa-thize. As Gwendolen says w hen she learns o f D eronda s background, estab-lishing credentials to sympathy m ore impressive, at that m om ent, than his ow n “You are just the same as if you were not a Jew ” (873).

T h ough Jewishness ostensibly functions in the novel as a signifier o f difference, that is, it is the po in t o f D eronda s Jewishness to make, w ith all the w eight the narrative can b ring to bear on the subject, no difference; ju st as Gaskell’s R u th is the fallen w om an w ho is no t “ really” fallen, D eronda is the Jew w ho must be “ju st the same” as if he were not. For this reason alone, it w ould make no sense for E liot to refer readers to any phys-ical m arker o f his Jewishness. In considering this issue I necessarily refer to C ynthia C hase’s 1978 essay, “T h e D ecom position o f the Elephants: D oub le-R ead ing Daniel Deronda ”n D espite C hase’s insistence on the bodily nature o f Jewish identity— “For D eronda no t to have know n he was Jewish until his m o ther to ld h im m e a n s . . . ‘that he never looked dow n’ ” (222)— the m ost im portan t feature o f Jewishness as an aspect o f D eronda s cultural and physical identity is its invisibility.12 A figure drawn

11 Acknowledging the insights o f Lennard Davis and Steven Marcus, Chase writes: “For Deronda not to have known he was Jewish until his mother told him means, in these terms, ‘that he never looked down,’ an idea that exceeds, as much as does magical metamorpho-sis, the generous limits o f realism.” “The D ecom position o f the Elephants: D ouble- Reading Daniel Deronda/ ’ PMLA 93 (1978): 222.

12 In this he resembles the “invisible” Jew o f the latter half o f the nineteenth century, as well as the one constructed by nineteenth-century liberal arguments: invisible unless he chooses not to be. O n the invisibility o f Jews in Europe in the latter half o f the nineteenth century, see Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (N ew York: Routledge, 1991), 99. David Feldman explains that in nineteenth-century England Jews were “not recognized” by the state as such; “they were disadvantaged as non-Anglicans and non-Christians.” “The ab-sence o f statutory recognition in Britain meant that structures o f communal authority and cohesion had to be manufactured entirely by Jews themselves.” Englishmen and Jews, 23. See p. 27 for liberalism’s idea o f the Jew, based on its identity as a “universalist, bourgeois creed, concerned with the rights o f individuals.”

Both Michael Ragussis and Christina Crosby note Eliot’s effacement— Christianization and secularization— o f Judaism in Daniel Deronda. See Crosby, The Ends of History (N ew York: Routledge, 1991), 27; Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, 226.

It is the increasing invisibility o f the Jew that makes it necessary for late-nineteenth- century race theorists to rely on the idea that difference is inscribed in blood; science takes on the task o f “seeing” and quantifying what the untrained eye cannot easily discern.

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from E lio t’s portfo lio o f classically featured sympathizers (such as D oro thea Brooke, also likened to a m useum piece) and from the V ictorian novel’s tradition o f a liberal subject w hose centrality and universality m an-ifest themselves in an ability to identify w ith the narratives o f others, D eronda m ust possess the ability to invest his self in o ther selves. Paradoxically, in order to identify him self w ith and as W estern cu lture’s m ost “m arked” other, he m ust be unm arked himself. Figured in the w h ite -ness and blankness o f the exemplary middle-class subject, his “representa-tive subjectivity” is, in David Lloyd’s words, a function o f his ability “ to take anyone’s place” ; he is the figure “o f a pure exchangeability.” 13

Yet by the end o f the novel this figure o f pure exchangeability has be-com e a national subject, w illing to devote his life to helping his “heredi-tary peop le” (724) found a nation. This developm ent, encom passed in a narrative that elicits D eronda s consent to w hat he is said incontrovertibly to possess— a Jewish identity— situates h im on bo th sides o f a colonialist imaginary. It participates in a Law rence-of-A rabia-like m ode o f cultural cross-dressing that is an expression o f colonial power: an exem ption from the identity boundaries that constrain others. A t the same time, it idealizes an em otional attachm ent and com m itm ent at odds w ith such freedom : the narrative o f D eronda s “discovery” produces an identity defined in nar-rowly national term s. Cultivating in her readers the k ind o f national and cultural d iscrim ination in w hich the narrator excels, E lio t constructs a Jewish hero w ho ostensibly exemplifies yet is him self clearly exem pt from such discrim ination, w ith an identity bo th global and narrowly national, d iscerning bu t no t generally discernible.

In Daniel Deronda, E liot projects her exem plary bourgeois subject into the context o f la te-n ine teen th -cen tu ry nationalism and contem poraneous debates about the relationship betw een the English and the Jews. T he idea o f nationalism allows her to play ou t in political and historical term s the

13 David Lloyd, “Race under Representation,” Oxford Literary Review 13 (1992): 70. In the course o f describing Eliot s use o f portraits in Daniel Deronda, Hugh Witemeyer sug-gests that, modeling Mordecai on Italian portraits, Eliot “almost subliminally” encourages her reader to “grant the Jews whatever tolerance and respect he is accustomed to grant the Italians.” “Eliot s pictorialism,” he writes, “here becomes a sophisticated rhetorical device employed in the service o f a liberal social vision.” George Eliot and the Visual Arts, 98. N ote the phrase “Hebrew dyed Italian” (Daniel Deronda, 748).

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collapse betw een sympathy and identity that occurs elsewhere in her fiction: in the idea o f national identity, as at the end o f m any o f E lio t’s novels, the lim ited field deem ed sym pathy’s proper sphere defines the self’s boundaries. If, as the novel seems to suggest, in the m odern w orld there is no bourgeois subject w ith o u t his o r her developm ental narrative, it also seems that the narrative that subtends bourgeois identity m ust be a na-tional one: the em otional and ethical coherence o f the bourgeois self de-pends upon know ing to w hat nation that self belongs. A nd yet national-ity is itself subordinated here to a h igh-cultural ideal w ith in w hich the Jew can also be the m odel English gentlem an, and the m odel English gentle-m an the Jew. Because o f these contradictions— and because sympathy, like national identity, has pow er to the ex ten t that it seems to em erge from w ith in— sympathy in Daniel Deronda is less a function o f self than a ratio-nale for self-construction, a narrative from w hich identity emerges appar-ently unw illed .14

It was as if he had found an added soul in finding his ancestry— his judgm ent no longer wandering in the mazes o f impartial sympathy, but choosing, w ith the noble partiality w hich is m an’s best strength, the closer fellowship that makes sympathy practical— exchanging that bird’s eye reasonableness which soars to avoid preference and loses all sense o f quality, for the generous reasonableness o f drawing shoulder to shoulder w ith m en o f like inheritance. (814; emphasis mine)

E lio t devoted her artistic career to the expansion o f her readers’ con -sciousnesses th rough sympathy. B ut the ethical com pulsion to em brace difference in an attem pt to recognize in the o ther “an equivalent center o f self” (in Middlemarch’s famous form ulation) gives way, in D aniel D eronda s

14 O n the Jew and the gentleman as similar figures o f exchange see Catherine Gallagher, “George Eliot and Daniel Deronda: The Prostitute and the Jewish Question,” in Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, ed. R uth Bernard Yeazell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 39-62.

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decision “ to identify myself, as far as possible, w ith m y hereditary people” (724), to an explicit com punction to seek ou t sameness: D aniel w ill live ou t his life, to paraphrase G w endolen H arleth, n o t necessarily w ith no one he does no t like, bu t w ith no one he is n o t like (says G wendolen: “ It came over m e that w hen I was a child I used to fancy sailing away into a w orld w here people w ere n o t forced to live w ith any one they did no t like” [760]). Som e years before W ilde exposes V ictorian sym pathy’s exhausted state in The Picture o f Dorian Gray, E liot characterizes sympathy as a cur-rency w hose random expenditure engenders em otional paralysis and in -hibits action. G iving us in D eronda a character w ho n o t only fails to save G w endolen H arleth bu t also fails to sympathize w ith her as well (his final advice to her is, essentially, that she learn to sympathize w ith herself), E liot rejects, or at least severely qualifies, the intersubjective ideal her novels have com e to represent.15

In Daniel Deronda, the attenuated self that tends to trouble participants in the sym pathetic exchange appears as a single character’s sustained prob-lem o f self-defm ition. D eronda’s too diffuse extension o f self defines a sympathy that, E liot claims, threatens sympathy’s demise: “His plenteous, flexible sympathy had ended by falling into one cu rren t w ith that reflective analysis w hich tends to neutralize sym pathy” (412). In particular, this k ind o f sympathy engenders n o t ju st em otional paralysis bu t an in -ability to act: D eronda’s “m any-sided sym pathy. . . hinder[s] any persistent course o f action.” Sym pathy’s m ultiplication o f selves leads, oddly, to a deficit; the capacity to sympathize w ith everybody renders D eronda a k ind o f nobody.

B ut the term “sympathy” serves as a confusing kind o f catch-all here: in the phrase “that reflective analysis w hich tends to neutralize sympathy,” one k ind o f sympathy is said to cancel another. D eronda’s early sympathy is as-sociated bo th w ith an exemplary personality and w ith a search for self that suggests he has no t yet found his identity. In fact, the negative cast o f D eronda’s pre-M ordecai em otional life— the free-floating sympathy Eliot calls a “meditative interest in hum an misery” that “passes for com radeship” (219)— heightens the need for the em otion that forms its necessary antidote and for the narrative o f discovery that will serve as that em otion’s vehicle.

15 Alexander Welsh notes Eliots questioning o f her “steady faith in sympathetic under-standing.” George Eliot and Blackmail (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 302.

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R eplacing one brand o f sympathy w ith another, the novel rejects D eronda’s ability to identify universally in favor o f the strong em otion that arrives, in a narrative o f nationhood, to narrow his concerns. T he sympathy D eronda possesses early in his life becomes passionate feeling w hen he finds the nar-rative in w hich he wishes to insert himself, one that allows him to define his identity in bo th individual and cultural term s and that he may im agine as thrust upon him rather than ambitiously sought after: “Since I began to read and know, I have always longed for some ideal task, in w hich I m ight feel myself the heart and brain o f a m ultitude— some social captainship, w hich w ould com e to m e as a duty, and no t be striven for as a personal prize” (819).

D eronda’s Z ionism is usually regarded as a development and expansion o f his early sympathy. B ut in fact, the identity he “discovers”— a national and re-ligious identity as leader o f his people— is a rewriting o f the attenuated self he is attem pting to escape. For in this novel the substitution o f one form o f sympathy for another can replace one form o f identity w ith another, or, m ore specifically, can replace an effect o f nonidentity w ith an effect o f identity only because, in nationalisms m odel o f the self, the others w ith w hom one identifies are, precisely, not “other.” Nationalism draws its power from its abil-ity to transform a certain kind o f attenuated identity into identity’s essence, saying “you are w ho you sympathize with.” As Julia Kristeva writes, “in na-tionalism,‘I am ’ becomes ‘I am one o f them,’‘to be’ becomes ‘to belong.’ ” 16 T he m odernist tendency toward diffusion, anonymity, and anom ie repre-sented in the novel as an effect o f imperialism, in the characters o f Gwendolen and Grandcourt, and in the ever present m etaphor o f gambling is countered by a pull toward identity that, as if to ward o ff the “scattered” effect o f internationalism, casts sympathy in the form o f national identity, in effect collapsing any difference betw een the tw o.17 It is this collapse that Eliot, startlingly, dubs “practical.” (In this sense, D eronda’s desire to give a

16 As Franco Moretti notes, Daniel Deronda is the product o f a period in which, “in ide-ology after ideology the individual figured simply as part o f the whole.” The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), 228. Julia Kristeva writes, “Subjectively, the issue o f ‘national’ identity is that indistinct domain o f psychic and historical experience w hich transforms identity into belonging.” “Proust: In Search o f Identity,” in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, ed. Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 140.

17 Caroline Lesjack argues that the capitalist expansion for which the nation state serves as “motor” is also responsible for the sense o f rootlessness and anomie from which Deronda

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“centre” to his “scattered” people is the equivalent o f locating a center for his ow n scattered identity [875]. A nd no t only is individual identity based on national identity, but the nation itself is im agined as a kind o f unruly charac-ter requiring em otional organization.) In Daniel Deronda, w hat is represented as sympathy w ith the other turns out to be sympathy w ith the self. Becom ing and at the same time discovering that he already “is” the o ther w ith w hom he sympathizes, D eronda provides a m odel o f selective sympathy that, Eliot wished, w ould make it possible for her readers to sympathize w ith the Jews.18

“Then it is not my real name?” said Deronda, w ith a dislike even to this trifling part o f the disguise w hich had been thrown around him.

“O h, as real as another,” said his mother, indifferently.“The Jews have always been changing their names.” (701)

T h e narrow ing o f D eronda’s identity into Jewishness may be said bo th to evade and to avoid the problem atic topic o f the Jewish body by simply leaving it aside. In fact, E liot enlists bo th heredity and narrative in the con-struction o f D eronda s identity. D espite language suggesting that for Eliot national feeling is “genetically based,” 19 and despite C hase’s claim that Daniel Deronda self-deconstructs, E lio t’s novel in fact produces w hat n ine teen th -cen tu ry and later nationalism requires: consent. Daniel Deronda

suffers; nationalism, Eliot’s prescription for Deronda, is also at the root o f his problems. Eliot’s contradictory use o f the term “sympathy” may thus be said to express nationalism’s contradictory impulses. “Labours o f a M odern Storyteller: George Eliot and the Cultural Project o f ‘N ationhood,’ ” in Victorian Identities, ed. R uth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (NewYork: St. Martin’s, 1996), 25-42.

18 It should be pointed out that while many modern critics discuss Eliot s effacement o f Jewish identity in Daniel Deronda, this strategy did not universally succeed in persuading English readers to sympathize with the Jews; rather, what many saw as the novel’s narrow concerns and intellectualism tended to alienate readers, some o f w hom pronounced it a failure. See the reviews collected in John Holmstrom and Laurence Lerner, eds., George Eliot and Her Readers (London: The Bodley Head, 1966), 122-58.

19 Katherine Bailey Linehan, “M ixed Politics: The Critique o f Imperialism in Daniel Deronda,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34 (1992): 345.

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is less significantly about D eronda s discovery o f his Jewishness than it is about w hat E liot calls his “consent to the fact” (819). As his m other chides, bitterly bu t justifiably, “You are glad to have been b o rn a Jew .. . . T hat is because you have n o t been brought up as a Jew ” (693). Daniel Deronda is the narrative that makes D eronda “glad to have been b o rn a Jew.”

C hase’s argum ent for the novel’s self-deconstruction depends on the way its logic seems to require D eronda to discover that he is Jewish, ren-dering his identity, in Hans M eyrick’s words, a “present cause o f past effects” and disrupting the fundam ental tenet o f narrative realism, linear causality. For Chase, M ordecai’s “coercive” identification o f D eronda— the way in w hich D eronda seems to be a product o f M ordecai’s vision— violates b o th M ordecai’s apparent recognition o f D eronda and Paul de M an ’s definition o f identity as som ething know n rather than consti-tu ted .20 H er in terpretation m ight be said to w ork so well precisely because o f its astounding literal-m indedness— one m ight also say essentialism— about Jewishness: a Jew must be circumcised; a Jew cannot becom e a Jew through conversion, and Eliot m ust have know n these things; therefore the novel’s account o f Jewishness is contravened by Judaism ’s very nature. W rites Chase, “ Conversion precisely does not apply to Jewish identity, w h ich is inherited , historical, and finally, here, genetic” ; according to Chase, Jewish identity cannot be the result o f a speech act.21

20 The phrase “present causes o f past effects” appears in a letter to Deronda (704) and is cited by Chase (“Decomposition o f the Elephants,” 215). Chase’s argument is based on what she calls an “identity principle” articulated by Paul de Man, in which knowledge o f identity is received passively rather than imposed (221). As Chase writes, “Such a notion, that iden-tity is the product o f a coercive speech act, deconstructs the identity principle and the con- stative concept o f language grounded upon it.” And for Chase this “identity principle” ap-plies, somewhat peculiarly, especially to Jews. More recent criticism argues that it is not the novel’s logic but rather Eliot’s idea o f racial memory that renders Deronda’s discovery o f his Jewishness inevitable.

21 Chase, “Decom position o f the Elephants,” 222. Chase’s “here” attributes any appar-ent racism to the novel. It is my sense, however, that what I have called “essentialism” in-heres in her argument— a sense influenced, for example, by her use o f de Man’s identity principle as the abstraction by means o f which identity is defined. I have been influenced as well by the way her argument echoes Sander Gilman’s description o f nineteenth- and twentieth-century racial theories, in w hich “the circumcision o f the genitals is the out-ward sign o f the immutability o f the Jew w ithin” (Jew’s Body; 204).

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N o t only are these assumptions technically incorrect, however, bu t in fact speech plays a p rom inent role in bo th E lio t’s and D eronda’s im agin-ing o f Jewish identity. It figures, for instance, in D eronda’s ow n conscious-ness o f it: M irah seems to him “a personification o f that spirit w hich im -pelled m en after a long inheritance o f professed C atholicism to leave w ealth and high place and risk their lives in flight, that they m ight jo in their ow n people and say,‘I am a Jew ’ ” (426). A nd D eronda him self m ust declare his Jewishness if anyone is to know about it, especially given his wish to m arry M irah. Som ew hat circularly, w hether one considers these statements to be speech acts depends on w hether one considers Jewishness inheren t in, or ultim ately detachable from, identity, o r considers identity- for-others constitutive o f iden tity In any event, D eronda’s consent to his Jewishness, like his m o th er’s repudiation o f hers, represents Jewish identity as characteristically em braced, repudiated, o r at the very least altered.22

For Chase, tw o “identity principles” are in conflict in the novel; iden-tity, she claims, cannot be bo th the result o f recognition and its effect. B ut her ow n language suggests that these principles may in fact support rather than cancel each other. “ O n the one hand,” she w rites, “M ordecai’s identification o f D eronda is presented as a recognition, and for this reason his assertion o f a claim on h im has au thority and appeal. O n the o ther hand, D eronda’s assumption o f the identity o f M ordecai’s prefigured friend is show n to be a consequence o f M ordecai s act o f claim ing him . H e be-

For a response to Chase that challenges her deconstructive method but reads Deronda’s body just as literally, see K. M. N e w t o n Daniel Deronda and Circumcision,” in In Defence of Literary Interpretation: Theory and Practice (London: Macmillan, 1986), 197-211.

22 In response to Joseph Kalonymos’s insistence that he “call [himself] a Jew and profess the faith o f [his] fathers,” Deronda asserts: “I shall call myself a Jew .. . . But I will not say that I shall profess to believe exactly as my fathers have believed” (792).

See Feldman, Englishmen andJews, 23, on the idea that in Victorian England Jewish com -munity “depended solely on voluntary association”— that is, on choice, the affirmation o f identity.

As Ragussis notes, the idea that Judaism was “natural,” and that converting a Jew was therefore a logical impossibility, arose from the new “science” o f ethnology in the mid-nineteenth century. Robert Knox wrote that the Jews were “unaltered and unalterable,” and that Jews could not be converted because “Nature alters not.” See Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, 26; Knox, The Races of Men: A Fragment (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1850), 206. Christina Crosby also discusses Deronda’s assertion o f Jewishness, though her reading differs from mine and supports Chase’s (Ends of History, chap. 1).

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com es w hat M ordecai claims he is.”23 B u t this “becom ing” in no way conflicts w ith D eronda’s account o f his com ing-to-Jewishness: as he tells M ordecai and M irah, “ I f this revelation had been m ade to m e before I knew you bo th , I th ink my m ind w ould have rebelled against it. Perhaps I should have felt then— ‘If I could have chosen, I w ould n o t have been a Jew.’ W hat I feel now is— that my w hole being is a consent to the fact. B ut it has been the gradual accord betw een your m ind and m ine w hich has brought about that full consent” (819).

Indeed, the consent o f his “w hole being”— body and m ind— is crucial to the construction o f D eronda s identity, and the narrative that produces consent, activating readerly sympathy in the process, is arguably m ore cru-cial than the “fact” o f Jewish birth . D evising a character w ho actively de-sires his national identity, Eliot produces in her hero an exemplary subject o f la te-n ine teen th -cen tu ry nationalist ideology. A ccustom ed early in his life to “a state o f social neutrality” encouraged by “ the half-know n facts o f his parentage,” D eronda rejects success at C am bridge for the sentim ental education travel will provide, “ the sort o f apprenticeship to life w hich w ould no t shape h im too definitely, and rob him o f that choice that m ight com e from a free g row th” (220). A nd in that shapelessness, manifest in his ability to “ [think] him self im aginatively in to the experience o f o thers” (570), he resembles no th ing so m uch as the conventional liberal subject o f the n ine teen th -cen tu ry novel. Just as im portan t as— perhaps m ore im por-tant than— the know ledge o f D eronda’s m aternal orig in , that is, is the process by means o f w hich he arrives at and com es to em brace that knowledge, and by means o f w hich w hat is cast as shapelessness gradually gives way to w hat he, and Eliot, w ant to call shape.24

23 Chase, “Decom position o f the Elephants,” 221; my emphasis.24 The novel, and my argument, may seem to leave the body behind by emphasizing

consent. But the novel returns to the body— and returns the body to the text— by way o f its emphasis on feeling. In contrast with his mother and her “sincere representations” o f feeling, Eliot pointedly has Deronda pale with “what seems always more o f a sensation than an emotion— the pain o f repulsed tenderness” (6 9 7 ). And for Deronda nationality is less as an accident o f birth than something “throbbing in his veins” (411). If Deronda’s identity, like nationalism, presents itself as “simultaneously open and closed” (Anderson, Imagined Communities, 1 4 6 ), simultaneously indeterminate and overdetermined, and simul-taneously bodiless and embodied, it is because o f the multiple and mutually contradictory tasks Eliot’s sympathy requires it to perform.

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In Daniel Deronda and in other writings, such as “T he M odern Hep! Hep! H ep!” Eliot blurs the difference between constructions o f nation and race, suggesting that “national life” springs from “nature” and blood; in the novel, she implies as well w hat Katherine Linehan calls a “genetically based ances-tral m em ory”25 B ut national identity in Daniel Deronda, as in the late nine-teenth century, was made as well as found; constructions o f national identity depended then as they do now on constructing the made as found. As E. J. H obsbaw m writes o f “that characteristic form ation o f the nineteenth cen-tury, the nation-state,” “the state no t only made the nation, bu t needed to make the nation.” Like Eliot, H obsbaw m conceives o f Jewish identity as a paradigmatic version o f n ineteenth-century European nationalism; national identity, he writes, especially in the Hapsburg Empire and the Jewish dias-pora, inhered “no t in a particular piece o f the map to w hich a body o f in-habitants were attached, but in the m em bers o f such bodies o f m en and w om en as considered themselves to belong to a nationality, wherever they happened to live.”26 T he phrase “considered themselves” bears directly on E liot’s account o f D eronda s acceptance o f his Jewish identity. Particularly toward the end o f the century, w hen nationalist expansion and imperial conquest m eant no t only locating national subjects and institutions outside territorial boundaries but also frequently inculcating a sense o f national identity in those w ho could no t be said to have been bo rn w ith one, the Jewish desire for a nation m ight well be regarded as a m odel for the idea o f desiring the “national” com ponent o f one’s identity. For at stake in late- nineteen th-cen tury nationalism is the identification betw een the institu-tions that define the self and “identity” itself: w hat Terry Eagleton calls “ that historically new form o f power that A ntonio Gramsci has term ed ‘hege-m ony’— that process w hereby the particular subject so introjects a universal law as to consent to its imperatives in the form o f consenting to his ow n deepest being.”27 Indeed, given the m ultideterm ined nature o f late- nineteenth-century Judaism (which, like an “u r” nationalism, encompasses and blurs distinctions between ideas o f family, race, culture, religion, and na-tion), it makes sense that Jewish identity in Daniel Deronda be bo th discov-

25 Linehan, “Mixed Politics,” 345.26 E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (N ew York: Pantheon, 1987), 148-49.27 Terry Eagleton, “Nationalism, Irony, and Commitment,” in Nationalism, Colonialism,

and Literature, ed. Seamus Deane (Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press, 1990), 32.

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ered and chosen: that a narrative describing the long-awaited result o f a fam-ily history o f repression and denial and, above all, o f the mystical prom pting o f feeling should produce a subject fashioned in an impossibly coincidental blending o f chance and choice. N ationalism s magic is, as B enedict A nderson writes, “to tu rn chance into destiny,”28 creating “consent” for identities also authorized as “fact.”

In Deronda, as I have suggested, bourgeois identity emerges from na-tional identity. Aware o f his ethical duty to others, D eronda does no t ac-tively prosecute that duty until he perceives it to be part o f his identity: until he knows, or feels, w ho he is. A nd know ing w ho he is means know -ing to w hat nation he belongs. A t that point, w hat prepares the ground for and in fact finally constitutes his identity is a sympathy so unw illed as to present itself as the result o f a series o f fortuitous events, events that are no t actively desired bu t that simply overtake the self.

In the context o f late-nineteenth-century nationalist expansion and discus-sions o f Jewish identity, w hat E liots exemplary sympathizer must possess is the ability to “be at hom e in foreign countries” (220) and to “understand other points o f view ” (224), a phrase in w hich “other” signifies “other na-tions.” B ut in the context o f the novel, “o ther” points as well toward W estern culture s perennial other— the Jew — and to the mutually constitu-tive and phantasmatic roles played by body and m ind in nationalist con-structions. Exploiting the ambiguous roles o f b irth and consent, accident and purpose in the construction o f national identity, Eliot conceives o f a subject who, though bo rn a Jew, must com e to desire Jewish identity through the gradual assumption o f a feeling o f likeness and belonging. And, w hen this feeling arrives, this subject discovers— in a circular fantasy o f com plete sympathy in w hich the physical body gives empirical weight to the feeling o f belonging— that he is that other. D eronda s body is sympathy made manifest, identified in its essence— so the story has it— w ith the social and cultural other.29 (Hence his body, invoked by critics from Chase on as the place w here the novels realism founders, has in fact little to do w ith re-

28 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 12.29 What after all is “consent” but a merging o f the willed and the unwilled? The term

implies choice, but according to an essentialist reading Deronda would have no choice.

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alism at all: as the exemplary sympathetic body in all the ways I have sug-gested, it is the novel’s most phantasmatic construction.) But with his ex-emplary ability to sympathize, Deronda represents as well Eliot’s ideal of high culture— the very culture to which her own novels belonged, and which they assisted in constructing. Thus the novel’s “others” must remain other, with the capacity to arouse repulsion and disgust; their role in the con-struction of the hero’s identity cannot be acknowledged. And thus Eliot’s narrative of sympathy with the Jews takes shape as a narrative in which the obstacle of otherness vanishes. (Deronda’s rationalization o f his ready attrac-tion to Mordecai s ideas despite their source, for instance— “what was there but vulgarity in taking the fact that Mordecai was a poor Jewish work-man ... as a reason for determining beforehand that there was not some spir-itual force within him that might have a determining effect on a white- handed gentleman?”— testifies less to an egalitarian spirit than to the appeal of the romantic idea that “poverty and poor clothes” have, “in some re-markable cases,” accompanied “inspiration” [571].) Deronda embodies an absolute merging o f self and other (a merging suggested repeatedly by Mordecai s insistence that Deronda must “be not only a hand to me, but a soul— believing my belief—hoping my hope— seeing the vision I point to” [557])» but this complete sympathy is possible only when identity has been evacuated o f everything but the self’s projections. A subject can become “other,” the novel’s collapsing of sympathy and national identity suggests, only when identity equals identity politics: when self and other merge be-cause they are already merged into an imaginary unified identity.

The wish-fulfillment structure that for Chase deconstructs the novel’s re-alism may thus be seen as a consequence of a logic the novel shares with na-tionalism, in which desire for a particular identity becomes a crucial compo-nent of an identity said to be already possessed (what else might it mean to “consent” to one’s identity?). In a move that conveys the way the pictoriai- izing imagination assists in sympathy’s mystifications, Deronda is described as the realization of Mordecai s wish: “the outward satisfaction of his longing” (550). Deronda’s apparent production as an effect of Mordecai s desire is thus not most significantly (as Chase reads it) a violation of realism; it is rather an exposure of the way sympathy turns happenstance into fate and makes choices seem to be determined by the promptings o f some unalterable essence at the self’s core. (Gwendolen, telling Deronda of Grandcourt s death by drowning, uses a similar formulation: “I only know that I saw my wish

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outside m e” [761].) In both instances, narrative is com pleted or fulfilled by a picture that collapses narrative in the seemingly inevitable materialization o f unconscious desires. If, then, in Chase s words,“a reader feels” that “it is because Deronda has developed a strong affinity for Judaism that he turns out to be o f Jewish parentage,”30 this narrative convolution is less significantly “a de- construction o f the concept o f cause” than a structural affirmation o f the privileged status the novel accords to feeling, especially “national feeling.” Daniel Deronda lays the groundwork for a consent not at odds w ith physical identity, but rather in support o f it.31

In m aking Jewish identity grow out o f feeling and require consent, Eliot substantiates the mythos o f national identity on w hich nation-states w ould increasingly com e to rely: the way in w hich, w ith the w idening reach o f empire, feeling increasingly becom es the ground o f national identity. W hat, after all, is national identity but fellow feeling, a sympathy w hose or-ganizing principle is the country to w hich (and the fellows to w hom ) one considers oneself to belong? Simultaneously “natural” and capable o f “nat-uralization,” national identity is constituted as a sensibility in w hich, ad-vantageously for the nation that wishes to com m and allegiance, the ge-nealogical and the emotive or intellectual are suggestively confused. In John Stuart M ills language, fellow feeling bo th follows from and leads to all the givens o f nationality— race, descent, language, religion, geography and his-tory, and “w ithou t fellow-feeling. . . the united public opinion, necessary to the w orking o f representative governm ent cannot exist.” W ith reassuringly circular reasoning, Daniel Deronda— like nationalism— implies that feeling is also a given: the sympathy that affirms identity is also its consequence.32

30 Chase, “Decom position o f the Elephants,” 217; my emphasis.31 M y concerns echo those o f recent criticism, in which the salient question is, What is

a Jew? See, for instance, Lawrence Lipking s review o f Ragussis and others, “The English Question,” New Republic, 26 February 1996, 33.

Controversy over whether Jews should take the Christian oath in order to serve in Parliament provides an interesting example o f the requirement for “consent.” As Feldman writes, “It was not until 1866 that the Parliamentary Oaths Act introduced a form o f words for both Houses which required a conscientious speaker to believe in God but made no particular demands beyond this” (Englishmen and Jews, 46).

32 J. S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (London, 1861), 287; quoted in Feldman, Englishmen and Jews, 73.

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R a th e r than prom oting sympathy as a means tow ard understanding difference, then— indeed, strikingly rejecting that principle in D eronda s rejection o f G w endolen— the novel valorizes sympathy as an iden-tification w ith and affirmation o f similarity. In this way Daniel Deronda may seem to naturalize o r racialize sympathy: to suggest that D eronda’s sympathy w ith M ordecai, like M ordecai’s recognition o f D eronda, is linked to the presence in bo th o f Jewish b lood (a version o f the supersti-tion, discussed by Sander Gilman, that Jews will always recognize one an-other).33 Indeed, “sensibility” may seem to provide the key to the novel’s idea o f racial difference, if one agrees w ith G ilm an’s reading o f the narra-to r’s remark: “A nd one m an differs from another, as we all differ from the Bosjem an, in a sensibility to checks, that com e from a variety o f needs, spiritual or o th e r” (370).34

A nd yet by restricting D eronda’s attraction to the m ore “ refined” o f Jews, E liot reveals the weak po in t in this argum ent: it is no t so m uch p eo -ple o f the same blood w ho will find one another as people o f the same sensibility. In Daniel Deronda, the rew riting o f nationality as sensibility en-ables the w ell-know n scenario in w hich the novel divides Jews into two types, one degraded and one ideal, and insists that its hero can identify w ith , and establish an identity as, the latter bu t no t the former. D eronda’s discovery that he belongs to— is one o f—the people w ith w h o m he m ost sympathizes substantiates the im portance o f taste (what Sir H ugo, nicely suggesting that the capacity to change identities is a m atter o f having the proper credentials, calls D eronda’s “passport in life” [217]) in the form a-tion o f his identity; indeed, it subverts w hat the novel calls sympathy— an “early habit o f th inking him self imaginatively into the experience o f o th -ers” (570)— by m aking those others in w h o m D eronda finally decides to invest his feeling in to projections o f him self (“my hereditary people”). His new found sympathy, as an expression o f his identity, thus acts as a kind o f quality control, “ exchanging that b ird’s-eye reasonableness w hich soars to

33 Gilman, Jew’s Body, 242. After he learns his history from his mother, Daniel has “a quivering imaginative sense o f close relation with his grandfather” (747); elsewhere he reflects on his “inherited yearning” for Zionism (819). Linehan notes these examples (“Mixed Politics,” 335-36).

34 Gilman, “Black Bodies, W hite Bodies: Toward an Iconography o f Female Sex-uality in Late N ineteenth-C entury Art, M edicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 239.

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avoid preference and loses all sense o f quality, for the generous reason-ableness o f drawing shoulder to shoulder w ith m en o f like inheritance” (814).

D eronda’s identity requires a grounding in feeling and intellect as well as in physical fact, then, no t only because, despite its apparent naturaliza-tion (the way, as B enedict A nderson puts it, “nation-ness is assimilated to skin-colour, gender, parentage and b irth -era— all those things one cannot help”),35 n ine teen th -cen tu ry nationalism increasingly required citizens to “ consent to the fact,” bu t because for E liot sensibility transcends nation-ality, rew riting bo th nationality and “race” in the service o f the bourgeois m andate to sympathize, so that w hat is by definition constitutive o f bo th— a sense o f difference— ceases to exist.

D eronda’s discovery o f and sympathy for M irah also undercuts the ar-gum ent that racial impulses underlie his attraction to Jews. H aving re-tu rned from abroad yet still possessing no clear sense o f vocation or duty, D eronda is a free-floating vessel o f sympathy, E lio t’s ethical self stripped to its essentials: a no t-yet-fu lly fo rm ed bourgeois subjectivity awaiting, barnacle-like, the appearance o f a figure to w hom he may attach himself. H e drifts in his boat, “forgetting everything else in a half-speculative, half-involuntary identification o f him self w ith the objects he was looking a t” (229). A n image appears that appeals to his discrim inating sensibility: in -ton ing the gondolier’s song from R ossin i’s Otello, he suddenly sees “a figure w hich m ight have been an im personation o f the misery he was u n -consciously giving voice to.” Similarly, the singing, w e learn later,“ entered her [Mirah s] inner w orld w ithou t her having taken any notice o f w hence it cam e” (227). A n idea o f “racial” difference gives way to a fantasy o f em otional likeness expressed th rough the vehicle o f cultural identity, o f playing the same role in a cultural narrative; M irah, w ith her C hristian looks and her desire to be accepted as an artist expresses the same assimi-lationist im pulse D eronda’s character does. A nd if cultural artifacts and narratives shape and give voice to w hat D eronda sees, they also shape his desire to continue looking. In a version o f M ordecai in the m useum , the vehicle o f sympathy here is the cultured eye selectively seeing and seeking its beloved; this scene at once exposes the arbitrariness o f D eronda’s at-

35 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 143.

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tachm ent and shows how sensibility’s projections transform arbitrariness into narrative. “ It was only the delicate beauty, the picturesque lines and colour o f the im age that were exceptional,” bu t “ there was no denying that the attractiveness o f the image m ade it likelier to last” (228). Seeing M irah as bo th image and narrative, as a “girl-tragedy” w hose outline is “as clear to h im as an onyx cameo,” D eronda begins, “unconsciously,” to find narrative form for his ow n life as well.

“W hat I have been most trying to do for fifteen years is to have some understanding o f those w ho differ from myself.”(Deronda, 692)

D eronda’s unconscious selection o f M irah is m atched by his rejection, at the same unintentional level, o f his m other. Critics tend to take Eliot at her w ord w hen she names sympathy as D eronda’s ch ief quality.Yet in in -terview after in terview w ith G w endolen and his m other, he appears awk-ward, stiff, and unable to speak— unable, despite his ow n and E lio t’s protes-tations to the contrary, to sympathize. Scenes o f sympathy in this novel record no t D eronda’s em otional receptivity or effective counseling bu t rather D eronda as a horrified and helpless spectator to situations and indi-viduals beyond his control, stiffly delivering m oral precepts that bear m ore on his ow n situation than on anyone else’s.36

D eronda’s encounters w ith G w endolen and his m other are m arked by a sense o f the distance betw een them and o f D eronda’s inability to bridge that distance th rough language. “ I beseech you to tell m e w hat moved you— w hen you were young, I m ean— to take the course you did,” he pleads. B ut the plea is underm ined by the narrator’s assertion that D eronda is “trying by this reference to the past to escape from w hat to h im was the heart-rending piteousness o f this m ingled suffering and defiance.” H e as-sures his m other, “T ho u g h my ow n experience has been quite different, I enter into the painfulness o f your struggle” (694). Differences in experi-

36 One exception is R . H. Hutton, writing in the Spectator, 10 June 1876. See Holmstrom and Lerner, George Eliot and Her Readers, 131.

ence supposedly make no difference to w hat the novel calls an “early habit” o f sympathy, and to the claim m ade th roughout E lio t’s novels for the fungibility o f suffering. B ut Daniel Deronda jettisons this bourgeois ideal— the possibility that anyone can p u t themselves im aginatively in anyone else s place— relying instead on increasingly specific kinds o f ex-perience to justify the channeling o f D eronda’s sympathies in new and specific directions. “ I have had experience w hich gives m e a keen interest in the story o f a spiritual destiny em braced willingly, and em braced in y o u th ” (555), he tells M ordecai; o r,“H e had lately been living so keenly in an experience quite apart from G w endolen’s lot, that his present cares for her were like a revisiting o f scenes familiar from the past, and there was no t yet a com plete revival o f the inward response to th e m ” (752).

T he novel suggests that the liberation o f D eronda s m other from a be-lief in the inevitability o f identity has its cost in feeling, m aking her an ac-tress in every realm o f life and rendering her unable to provide the m a-ternal feeling her son requires. T he Princess doesn’t ju st reject identity categories, that is, she rejects identities and the bonds that go w ith them : hers (as m other and Jew) and D eronda’s (as her son). B ut in fact she ex-presses the same sympathetic principle D eronda eventually does: the be-lief that a specific group identification is a prerequisite for sympathy. H ence her rebuff to her son’s sympathetic gestures (a rebuff that under-scores the p rom inent position this novel holds in the history o f identity politics):“You are no t a woman.You may try— but you can never im agine w hat it is to have a m an’s force o f genius in you, and yet to suffer the slav-ery o f being a girl” (694). H ere E liot discloses the different effects and consequences o f w hat m ight anachronistically be te rm ed identity politics for m en and w om en in late V ictorian England. Identifying as a Jew, D eronda can overcome the effects o f prejudice and escape the bitterness o f his m o th er’s rejection. B ut his m other is condem ned for her lack o f m a-ternal feeling even as E liot seems to sympathize w ith her grievances. T he Princess’s detachm ent from her son causes the em otional vacancy he seeks to fill and requires h im to locate a source o f deep feeling elsewhere. Jewishness, “discovered” by D eronda as the secret o f his identity, provides h im w ith the sense o f authenticity and identity he has felt lacking; it ar-rives w ith the charge o f feeling missing in his family, and the assertion that all Jews are family (586) justifies the substitution.

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Consenting to the Fact 145

M ichael Ragussis sees in D eronda a theatrical personality to m atch G w endolen s: “his entire life has been a kind o f disguise or perform ance.”37 Given the shame D eronda associates w ith the idea o f perform ance, this re-semblance m ight be said to account for his inability to sympathize w ith bo th w om en: their theatricality renders them threateningly similar to him , and salvation appears as authenticity in the character o f M irah and in the Jewishness that offers D eronda a chance at a true identity. B ut to assert that D eronda’s disguise ceases w hen he discovers his true identity is to ignore the perform ative associations o f Jewish identity, especially the strong V ictorian association betw een Jewishness and theatricality— w hich is to say that, for D eronda, the Princess may represent the possibility that the identity he discovers is no m ore authentic than the one he gives up. Indeed, given her offhanded remark, “T he Jews are always changing their names,” it may be m ore accurate to locate D eronda’s Jewish identity no t in the fact o f his b irth bu t in his anxiety about his origins and reconstruc-tion o f his identity: no t in his new nam e bu t in the changing o f his name.

N o t only does the novel suggest the emptiness o f D eronda’s sympathy in relation to G w endolen, it also suggests that he possesses a capacity for representation similar to his m o th er’s, th o u g h in his case that capacity is (like almost everything else about him) unintentional.W hile finding the Princess guilty o f w hat the narrative calls “sincere acting,” a nature in w hich “all fe e lin g .. .im m ediately passed in to drama, and she acted her ow n em otions” (691), E liot also asserts that D eronda’s voice,“like his eyes, had the unintentional effect o f m aking his ready sympathy seem m ore per-sonal and special than it really was” (765). W hat passes as sympathy for G w endolen is the result o f a “lo o k ” that, rather than substantiating his moralizing, often records simply his instantaneous response to her. Despite this, however, G w endolen is m ore than ready to make him her confessor. T heir initial encounter prefigures the pattern: “T he inward debate w hich she raised in D eronda gave to his eyes a growing expression o f scrutiny, tending farther and farther away from the glow o f m ingled undefined sen-sibilities form ing adm iration___T h e darting sense that he was m easuringher and looking dow n on her as an inferior, that he was o f different qual-

37 Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, 277.

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ity than the hum an dross around her, that he felt him self in a region ou t-side and above her, and was exam ining her as a specim en o f a lower order, roused a tingling resentm ent w hich stretched the m om ent w ith conflict” (38). It is a measure o f w hat is conventionally called G w endolens narcis-sism, and may also be viewed as the dynamic o f the sympathetic exchange as E liot im agines it here, that w h en G w endolen responds to D eronda’s look rather than to his words, w hat she responds to is her ow n projection: her image reflected in his eyes. It is no t that D eronda’s countenance fails to convey w hat he feels, for it shows his feeling all too clearly; rather, D eronda reflects her desire to “be w hat you w ish” (672), w ith a gaze “ G w endolen chose to call ‘dreadful,’ though it had really a very m ild sort o f scrutiny” (226). (“ O ften the grand meanings o f faces as well as o f w rit-ten words may lie chiefly in the impressions o f those w ho look on th em ” [226]). A nd scenes o f sympathy betw een D eronda and G w endolen, too, emphasize the “looks” that register his sympathy as G w endolen’s fantasy. T ho u g h a Foucauldian reading m ight stress the indistinguishability o f D eronda’s sympathy for G w endolen from his pow er over her (indeed, D eronda’s ability to observe a face described as “unaffected by beholders” [38] is a measure o f the panoptic pow er the novel grants him), his pow er is less a function o f his ow n actions than o f G w endolen’s eagerness to view h im as an externalized conscience.38

G w endolen is no less a projective figure for D eronda than he is for her; w hen, in the novel’s opening scene, he feels “coerced” to look at her, the te rm suggests his ow n conventional susceptibility to a fem inine beauty he also fears. H ence his instantaneous avowal that coercion has taken the place o f pleasure and desire: “W hat was the secret o f fo rm or expression w hich gave the dynam ic quality to her glance? Was the good or evil ge-nius dom inant in those beams? Probably the evil; else w hy was the effect that o f unrest rather than o f undisturbed charm? W hy was the wish to look again felt as coercion and no t as a longing in w hich the w hole being consents?” (35). B o th the replacem ent o f aesthetic term s by m oral ones in the famous opening lines o f the novel (first “beautiful or no t beautiful,” then “good or evil” [35]) and the subsequent m ovem ent o f D eronda’s eyes

38 For a Foucauldian reading, see Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (N ew Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), chap. 6.

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(“A t one m om ent they followed the m ovem ents o f the figure, o f the arms and h an d s . . . and the nex t they re tu rned to a face w hich, at present unaffected by beholders, was directed steadily towards the gam e” [38]) show D eronda w ork ing to manage his desire for w hat he im m ediately deems an unsuitable object; it is the expression o f that struggle that G w endolen interprets as disapproval. A nd G w endolen helps h im replace desire w ith m oral ju dgm en t by assigning h im responsibility for her shame-ful feeling: her conviction that he “was m easuring her and looking dow n on her as an inferio r” comes from now here so m uch as her ow n sense that gam bling lowers her position in a m oral hierarchy. G w endolen is often ac-cused o f an overly intense attachm ent to her theatrical personality, bu t the pow er she bestows on D eronda suggests a desire to escape that theatrical-ity— to replace public drama w ith the greater intensity o f private drama, the kind o f in terio r or “closet” drama in w hich she and D eronda engage.39

W hat happens in this closet drama is an exchange o f subjectivities, but no t in the ideal form the te rm “sympathy” leads some readers to expect. “W hat should be a m om ent in w hich identities m erge”40 is in fact a re-peated opportunity for m utual projection, as Deronda and Gwendolen con-tinually miss each other, each using the o ther as a screen for his or her own concerns and anxieties. Indeed, w hen confronted w ith G wendolen s urgent need, D eronda most frequently notices, and Eliot most frequently calls at-tention to, the absence or insufficiency o f sympathetic feeling in him — the same absence he notes in his interviews w ith his mother. (Deronda is acutely conscious o f the gap betw een the sympathy G wendolen expects and w hat he actually has to offer [765]). T he narrators separate observations about G wendolen s anguish and D eronda s response to it maintain the isolation o f each— som ething like separateness w ithout com m unication.

Deronda s interest in Gwendolen, like his concern for M irah, is manifestly a function o f his interest in his own situation, especially his anxiety about the indeterminacy o f his identity. (W hen D eronda asks Gwendolen, by way o f

39 O n theatricality in Daniel Deronda, see Joseph Litvak, Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1992). W hile Daniel’s and Gwendolen’s misunderstandings are mutual, Eliot’s tendency to let the reader know the truth behind Daniel’s look suggests that Gwendolen’s misinterpretations allow him to maintain his inviolability.

40 Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings, 147.

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therapeutic cure, “ Is there any single occupation o f m ind that you care about w ith passionate delight or even independent interest” (507), he m ight as well be speaking to himself; his recommendation, that “ the higher life must be a region in w hich the affections are clad w ith knowledge,” is exactly the cure he discovers for him self [508].) B ut in taking a parental, feeling role toward her and then finding himself unable, or refusing, to fulfill it, he resembles the m other w ho has similarly repudiated maternal feeling for him. Indeed, it w ould appear that D erondas failures o f sympathy have m ore to do w ith overidentification than w ith an inability to identify: the failure he assigns to language seems to spring instead from his own anxieties.

D eronda s inability to respond to G w endolen increases w ith his interest in, and know ledge of, his ow n situation; the m ore she needs him , the less available he is. A nd by the tim e o f G randcourt s drow ning it is clear that sympathy for her has becom e an ethical obligation he acknowledges bu t cannot fulfill: “he wished, yet rebuked the wish as cowardly, that she could bury her secrets in her ow n bosom ” (754). (Seeing G w endolen once m ore after m eeting his m other, D eronda “ seem ed to him self now to be only fulfilling claims, and his m ore passionate sympathy was in abeyance” [752]). In the crucial scene after the drowning, he in fact hides his “look,” averting his face, “w ith its expression o f suffering w hich he was solemnly resolved to undergo.” T he scene is remarkable for its generation o f false interpretations: “T h eir attitude,” E lio t w rites, “m ight have told half the tru th o f the situation to a beholder w ho had suddenly entered.” A nd as D eronda grasps G w endolen’s hand, and “she in terpre ted its powerful effect on her in to a promise o f inexhaustible patience and constancy” (755), the distance betw een his feeling and her understanding is as great as the os-tensible distance betw een their narratives.

T he scenes o f sympathy betw een D eronda and G w endolen and D eronda and his m o ther suggest o ther reasons as well for D erondas si-m ultaneous attraction to and desire to distance him self from both, as well as for the way in w hich his sympathy for G w endolen takes the fo rm o f witnessing her distress, hin ting at w hat Leo Bersani has called a “ dysfunc-tional” attachm ent to scenes o f violence and suffering.41 D eronda cannot

41 Leo Bersani, “Representation and Its Discontents,” in Allegory and Representation: Essays from the English Institute, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 150.

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save G wendolen, that is— he must abandon her— because, like his m other, she exemplifies the identity he wishes to leave behind: the attraction to scenes o f suffering that characterizes D eronda s relation to her recalls his vexed relationship to his ow n suspected origins. E liot asserts that D eronda s activities “on behalf o f o thers” spring from a desire to distance him self from his ow n rage: “ In w hat related to him self his resentful im -pulses had been early checked by a m astering affectionateness. Love has a habit o f saying ‘N ever m ind ’ to angry self, who, sitting dow n for the nonce in the low er place by-and-by gets used to i t” (218). In D eronda’s em o-tional pathology, that is, sympathy is anger transformed; his sense o f injury takes the form o f “a hatred o f all in ju ry” and an “activity o f im agination on behalf o f others.” B u t the sympathy that em erges from this process lacks passion; it is a “meditative interest in learning how hum an miseries are w ro u g h t” that, in D eronda’s C am bridge days, “passed for com rade-ship” (219). A nything m ore, it seems, threatens to undo D eronda s “never m ind” w ith an acknow ledgm ent that he minds.

D eronda’s response to his m other renders in psychological term s a re-sponse at the level o f cultural sensibility: as the actress Alcharisi, his m other represents a degraded cultural narrative that, paradoxically, challenges D eronda s image o f him self as universally sympathetic, an image he asso-ciates w ith a self-educated, self-originated identity: “Since I began to read and know, I have always longed for some ideal task, in w hich I m ight feel myself the heart and brain o f a m ultitude— some social captainship, w hich w ould com e to m e as a duty, and n o t be striven for as a personal p rize” (819). (It is w orth no ting that the novel exchanges D eronda’s fantasy o f il-legitimacy for the “fact” o f Jewish birth , and that the attem pt to elevate the latter does no t cancel ou t the equalizing effects o f the exchange.) T he Princess’s story and profession (based on the life o f the actress Rachel) lo-cate her squarely no t only in Jewish culture bu t in lower-class Jewish cul-ture, bu t the emphasis o f E lio t’s retelling is on the m o th er’s rejection o f the son.42 W h en D eronda responds to his m other w ith “impulsive oppo-sition” (690), psychology justifies a m arking o f cultural boundaries: the re-pudiation o f the Princess’s cultural sensibility is recast as, and validated by,

42 Welsh discusses similarities between Gwendolen’s and Daniel’s stories in George Eliot and Blackmail, 298.

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the m o thers abandonm ent o f her son. It is as if “vulgar” Jewish culture re-jects D eronda rather than the o ther way around.

G w endolen, w hose theatricality and self-absorption echo the Princess’s, is similarly scapegoated th roughou t the novel to protect D eronda’s sym-pathetic identity.43 Identification w ith either w om an w ould negate bo th his E nglish-gentlem an self and his sympathetic one, n o t affirming the identity he wishes to claim b u t rather m arking its absence.44 Indeed, G w endolen and the Princess threaten no t only the narrative o f identity D eronda projects for him self bu t the idea o f essential identity per se: the Princess rejects all given identities, especially Jewishness; G wendolen, m anifesting dissatisfaction w ith her ow n identity, seeks outw ard assurance and instructions to construct a new one. Both, that is, express a desire and capacity for transform ation; b o th diplay the malleability D eronda em bod-ies yet wishes to reject. T h e self-knowledge that supposedly crowns his narrative and solidifies his identity— the know ledge contained in, and p ro-duced by, the affirmation “I am a Jew ”— thus effectively saves h im from another k ind o f self-knowledge: the k ind that threatens the no tion that he has any essential identity to discover at all. For D eronda, sympathy as a means o f defining identity enables an absolute denial o f origins, a rem ak-ing o f the self in ideal form ; his em bracing o f Jewishness is thus no t a dis-covery o f w hat he already is bu t a means o f escaping it. It is no t so m uch that “D aniel’s sym pathy. . . is a function o f his displaced social position,”45 bu t that sympathy w ith G w endolen and his m other, i f he had any, w ould bring hom e to h im the truths his chosen identity bo th expresses (in the

43 O n Gwendolen, see Litvak, Caught in the Act, 182 and passim. O n the “obvious” Jewish context for the Princess and her narrative, see Carol Ockman, “W hen Is a Star Just a Star? Interpreting Images o f Sarah Bernhardt,” in Jew in the Text, ed. N ochlin and Garb, 121-39. For instance, Ockman writes that the theater, “hardly an elevated calling in the nineteenth century, was a logical profession for those consigned by class or race to the lower echelons o f society” (123).

44 In her book on the actress Rachel Felix, Rachel Brownstein speculates that Rahel Levin Varnhagen, introduced to George Eliot by Lewes, may have suggested to the author some ideas about Rachel: like the actress, Rahel “had espoused assimilation,” and “had also believed that because she represented nothing intrinsically, she was free to stand for any-thing.” It is this idea o f representing “nothing intrinsically” that I would locate at the heart o f Daniel’s anxieties. Brownstein, Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comédie-Française (N ew York: Knopf, 1993).

45 Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings, 153.

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social displacement, the asserted nonidentity, o f the Jews) and denies (in E lio t’s attem pt to reverse the image o f Jewish degradation; in D eronda’s p roud acceptance o f his Jewish identity). Finally, D eronda clinches the identification betw een G w endolen and his ow n m o th er by abandoning her. H aving supposedly transcended his anger, he symbolically repays the w om en w hose powerful identities have w ounded h im by finding his iden-tity in a religion and a nation in w hich w om en have no such power. For D eronda, assuming— better, asserting identity means affirming the exclu-sionary perspective on w hich definitions o f identity depend.

A nd yet D eronda’s spectatorship is a fo rm o f violence linked textually no t only to G w endolen’s ow n “intentionless” violence against G randcourt bu t also to the characteristic intentionlessness o f sympathy and o f his ow n sympathetic narrative. As if in b itter acknow ledgm ent o f the paralysis by w hich his early sympathy is defined, as well as his similarity to the w om an w ho desperately requires his help, D eronda’s confession o f his inability to save G w endolen is significantly echoed by— and significantly amplifies— her confession o f her failure to save G randcourt. T he parallel suggests at least one way in w hich the novel’s tw o plots, often regarded as insuffi-ciently related, intertw ine.

O n two occasions, D eronda’s guilt about his inability to help G w endolen takes shape as an image o f h im standing by w hile she drowns. After she tells h im o f her displacement o f and guilt over Lydia Glasher, “She broke off, and w ith agitated lips looked at D eronda, bu t the expres-sion on his face pierced her w ith an entirely new feeling. H e was under the baffling difficulty o f discerning, that w hat he had been urging on her was throw n into the pallid distance o f m ere though t before the outburst o f her habitual em otion. It was as if he saw her drow ning w hile his limbs were b o u n d ” (509). In D eronda’s view, the failure is n o t his bu t hers: G w endolen’s “drow ning” results from her inability to move beyond her ow n “habitual em otion .” A nd in the scene before G randcou rt’s death, w hen she urgently presses upon D eronda her desire to be w hat he w ould like and he responds to her crisis w ith a profession o f his uselessness, D eronda assigns responsibility for his inability to help her to the grander realm o f languages inadequacy: “Words seemed to have no m ore rescue in them than if he had been beholding a vessel in peril o f w reck— the poor ship w ith its m any-lived anguish beaten by the inescapable sto rm ” (672-73).

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T he literalization o f these m etaphors in G randcourt s death gives m ean-ing to them , n o t least by pu tting G w endolen and D eronda figuratively in the same position. To stand by and w atch som eone drown, these parallels suggest, is to see o n e’s w ish outside oneself: to achieve o n e’s desires w ith -ou t explicitly acting on them . “We cannot kill and no t kill in the same m o m en t” (72), w rites E liot early in the novel, attem pting to distinguish betw een the multiple valences o f feeling and the necessary decisiveness o f action. B u t her novel proves her w rong. S tanding by w hile som eone drowns is an apt im age for the ac tion-in-inaction that defines bo th G w endolen’s m urderous im pulse and D eronda’s sympathy: w atching som eone drow n is an image o f a necessary abandonm ent o f responsibility, o f obligatory inaction rather than clearly defined refusal. T he scene cap-tures the am biguity o f D eronda’s w illed-yet-unw illed identity form ation, and o f the disidentification his identification requires: it externalizes the em otional force o f his rejection o f G w endolen and his response to his m other. As a spectator o f G w endolen’s suffering— able to hear her con-fessions bu t n o t to save her— D eronda, like G w endolen, remains sus-pended betw een violence and its absence even as G w endolen does in re-lation to G randcourt.46

If D eronda dem onstrates little o f his well-advertised ability to project h im self into o thers’ situations in his encounters w ith G w endolen and his m other, w ith M ordecai and M irah he needs no such ability bu t rather seems to experience an unw illed dissolution o f self. C om m unication be-tw een D eronda and M ordecai transcends language and in tention: “T he m ore exquisite quality o f D eronda’s nature— that keenly perceptive sym-pathetic emotiveness w hich ran along w ith his speculative tendency— was never m ore thoroughly tested. H e felt no th ing that could be called belief in the validity o f M ordecai’s impressions concerning him or in the prob-ability if any greatly effective issue: w hat he felt was a profound sensibility to a cry from the depths o f another soul” (553). D eronda’s encounters w ith

46 The image o f standing by watching someone drown also suggests the more general-ized, cultural guilt implied by the novels references to the Inquisition. Killing and not killing simultaneously, that is, might be taken as a description o f historical guilt about the English response to the expulsion o f the Jews— a guilt Daniel’s representation exists partly to assuage. “The prelude to Daniel’s acceptance o f his inheritance as a Jew,” Ragussis writes, “comes with a return to what I have contended is for Victorian England the crit-ical moment o f Jewish history.” Figures of Conversion, 281.

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M irah and M ordecai have none o f the sense o f failed sympathy that char-acterizes the scenes w ith G w endolen and the Princess; rather, they dem onstrate the pow er o f the intuitive, the nonverbal, the unspoken but com m only held sentim ent. This is the fantasy o f shared sensibilities that constitutes “national feeling,” a feeling w hose capacity to tu rn shared ideas into a conviction o f shared genealogy Eliot suggests w hen she writes, o f D eronda’s increasing sense o f com m itm ent to M ordecai“ in language that sensualizes, again th rough the use o f visual m etaphor, the idea o f ge-nealogical descent— “the lines o f w hat may be called their em otional the-ory touched” (605). (In po in ted contrast to G w endolen’s expansive, mis-guided in terpretation o f D eronda’s grasp, M ordecai is represented as a m ore accurate reader o f the “sym pathetic hand” than its ow ner: “T he sym pathetic hand still upon h im had fortified the feeling w hich was stronger than those words o f denial” [558].)

T he narrative o f D eronda’s discovery thus provides the justification, in sentimental, sympathetic, and rom antic terms, for an identity politics that enables h im to consent to w hat, it happily turns out, he already is. It sub-stantiates his identity as self-inventing liberal subject, a figure w hose abil-ity “to discover purpose in apparently random details offers strongest p roo f o f the subjects sovereignty.”47 For it transforms w hat he im agines Sir H ugo describing as a com m on “fanaticism,” and a som ew hat less com m on “m onom ania” (568), into a series o f “plainly discernible links” : “If I had no t found M irah, it is probable that I should no t have begun to be spe-cially interested in the Jews, and certainly I should no t have gone on that lo itering search after an Ezra C o h e n ” (573).

B ut the very “plainness” o f the links betrays this identity-narrative s self- serving quality: at its end, no th ing that does no t fit, like the “vulgar” Jews encountered along the way, remains. T h e sym pathetic impulse, for D eronda, is essentially a narrative one, and his tale o f rational sympathy collapses the difference betw een finding an identity and choosing one. “And, if you like, he was romantic* T hat young energy and spirit o f ad-venture w hich have helped to create the wo rid-w ide legends o f youthful heroes going to seek the h idden tokens o f their b irth and its inheritance

47 Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 232. See also Franco Moretti on the Bildungsroman in Way of the World, chap. 4.

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o f tasks, gave h im a certain quivering interest in the bare possibility that he was entering on a like track— all the m ore because the track was one o f thought as well as action” (574).

W hat D eronda discovers w hen he discovers his origins is the ratification o f his feeling by fact, and w hat he does w hen he discovers the fact is to ratify it w ith his feeling: the nature o f his identity, in a m anner historically characteristic o f Jewish identity, remains intim ately tied to the issue o f ac-ceptance or rejection. Like his m o ther in being a Jew, he chooses to differ from her by consenting w here she has refused. In fact, in choosing Jewish identity he replaces Judaism ’s m atrilineal principle w ith a patriarchal and spiritual line o f descent, em bodying his grandfather’s w ish rather than his m o th er’s. R eplacing family w ith nationalist ideology, the novel replaces w hat it represents as an accident o f b irth and the em otional failure o f fam -ily w ith w hat it construes as a m ore determ ined, determ ining em otional bond; it gives D eronda a phantasmatic, idealized family to com pensate for his early disappointm ents. R ew ritin g accident as destiny, moreover, it m imics nationalism ’s ow n constructions o f narrative. A ccording to George Eliot, you can choose your relatives— or at least you can choose am ong them . T he Princess highlights the invented nature o f her son’s identity w h en she disrupts his sense that “D eronda” is, as he puts it, his “real nam e.” If, as H obsbaw m suggests, Z ionism provides an “ex trem e” example o f the constructed or artificial nature o f national identity, D eronda’s narrative o f discovery does the same.48

W hat is revealed here is the capaciousness— the universal availability for projection— o f the te rm “sympathy” in this novel. D eronda s affectlessness passes for sympathy until som ething m ore like the real thing comes along; it constitutes a blank the discovery o f his Jewishness— his “real” identity— will fill. Sympathy in Daniel Deronda is the nam e for an attenuation o f self described bo th as a virtue— the result o f travel and a Cam bridge educa-tion— and as a malaise for w hich a dose o f strong feeling provides the cure. It attaches identity to narrative and ties passionate feeling to specific cul-

48 Ironically, Daniel himself suggests that Mirah change her name from Cohen to pur-sue her singing career: “We could choose some other name, however— such as singers or-dinarily choose— an Italian or Spanish name, which would suit your physique ’ (525).

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tural ideals, em bodied in an idealized self chosen to counter the degraded image D eronda has always associated fearfully w ith his birth; like a divin-ing rod, strong feeling provides iden tity ’s clues. A nd until this feeling ar-rives, bourgeois subjectivity— as in D eronda’s attem pts to sympathize w ith G w endolen— is no t an identity bu t ju st a job, and an onerous one at that. B ut as in any attem pt to resolve contradiction by division— here, the novel’s split betw een “g ood” Jews and “bad”— each half retains traces o f the other; Derondas idealized “ good” Jews reflect the pressure o f feelings and qualities rigorously excluded. W hile the split betw een “go o d ” and “bad” Jews has lately provided evidence for charges o f antisem itism in Daniel Deronda, the division is familiar enough in discussions o f transgres-sion, in w hich extremes o f high and low, or nobility and degradation, offer an image o f resolution for unresolved social conflicts.49 D erondas re-sponse to the novel’s “vulgar” Jews suggests the threat the unassimilated Jew represents for the assimilated one: as if granted a kind o f magical, sym-pathetic pow er— the lure o f authenticity— the one threatens to give the o ther away. B u t as the ideal bourgeois subject, D eronda doesn’t have to sympathize w ith the Jews because his sympathy has becom e a function o f his identity: simply put, he “is” one. A nd yet o f course he is not. T he char-acter “Daniel D eronda” thus expresses bo th the ideality and the impossi-bility o f E lio t’s liberal ideal. For if, as I have suggested, the function o f taste (or “d iscrim ination”) in the novel is to efface the difference Jewishness supposedly makes, the function o f biology or heredity is finally the same.

M aking D eronda b o rn bu t no t raised a Jew, rendering his Jewishness in -visible, E liot strategically solves the problem o f sympathy w ith the trans- gressive o ther by eradicating otherness from the start. D eronda em bodies sympathy w ith the Jews in the seamless boundary crossing, the transgres- sionless transgression, that the fact o f his b irth represents. For the m echa-nism o f b irth effectively renders D eronda s Jewishness intentionless: no t his fault. At the same time, as the English gentlem an w ho bears no visible traces o f Jewish identity, he exemplifies E lio t’s h igh-cu ltu re ideal. For E lio t’s ideal bourgeois subject is, significantly, n o t the Jew w ho is generally

49 O n transgression, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon W hite, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969). For the charge o f antisemitism, see Susan Meyer, “Safely to Their O w n Borders: Proto-Zionism, Feminism, and Nationalism in Daniel Deronda,” EL H 60 (1993): 733-58.

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discernible as one, w ho has no choice; he is instead the gentlem an w ho chooses to identify as a Jew (“ I will call myself a Jew ” [792]), the one for w hom otherness is happily assimilated through the desire and freedom the “passports” o f culture and education make available. (W hen, early in the novel, E liot invites her readers to envision as “ the m ost m em orable o f boys” the figure w hom , they will later discover, is o f Jewish descent, she encourages them to envision in her novels m ost significant test o f sympa-thy’s pow er— its ability to reach across V ictorian England’s least crossable o f barriers— an image w ith w hich, as self-projection, they, and she, are al-ready in sympathy. From the novel’s beginning, the idea o f cultural affinity serves to ward o ff the specter o f difference.) As the Jew w ho is ju st the same as if he were not, D eronda expresses the assimilationist nature o f E lio t’s liberal representation: her fantasy o f sympathy w ith the Jews.

T h e cure for the difficulties attendant upon non iden tity sympathy— sympathy that makes you lose your identity, in w hich you discover that you resemble those you d o n ’t w ish to resemble— thus turns ou t to be identity-sym pathy: sympathy that enables you to choose your identity, to identify w ith those w ho m atch your image o f your best self. It is for this reason that sympathy in the novel takes shape as a fantasy o f likeness: an identity politics in w hich differences betw een individuals are flattened out in favor o f a reassuring fantasy o f sim ilitude.50 W onderfully realized in tw in images o f C ohens, one degraded and one refined, E lio t’s split repre-sentation o f Jews amplifies the w ork done by D eronda’s sympathy. As an em bodim ent o f sympathy w ith the Jews, D eronda incorporates the de-graded orig in he has always feared, w hile the discovery o f M irah ’s “ refined” bro ther M ordecai and the transformative w ork o f D eronda’s sympathy allows h im to say “never m in d ” to it: he may sim ultaneously claim and distance him self from that origin. In this way, D eronda’s family drama enacts in m icrocosm the general E uropean anxiety about Jewish “contagion.”51 H ere again is the image: “he saw him self guided by some

50 As Christina Crosby writes, “To say ‘I am a Jew’ is significant not as a matter o f per-sonal identity, but as an acknowledgment o f the law and o f mankind s necessary corporate existence” (Ends of History, 20).

51 O n the connection between the Jew and the city, see Gilman,fe w ’s Body; on the con-nection between the city and ideas o f contagion and contamination, see Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 13$.

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official scout into a dingy street; he entered through a dim doorway, and saw a haw k-eyed w om an, rough headed, and unw ashed, cheapening a hungry girl’s last b it o f finery; or in some quarter only the m ore hideous for being smarter, he found him self under the breath o f a young Jew talk-ative and fam iliar. . . and so on.” D escribing the search for M irah’s family, D eronda cannot help bu t p u t h im self in the picture. M ediated through the blended im age o f cultural degradation and exaltation signified by the nam e “Jew ” (and em bodied in the figure o f M ordecai), D eronda s sympa-thy is the construction o f his identity th rough a gradual process o f refinem ent, enabling a phantasm atic exchange o f one aspect o f identity for another: good Jews for bad, that C o h en for this one.

A nd once this exchange has been com pleted, the novel’s “bad” Jews dis-appear— dem onstrating that the energy that sustained their representation was less that o f antisemitism than o f the exercise o f sensibility as a faculty, a necessary part o f the identity-shaping process I have described. For in Daniel Deronda, as in any identity politics, identity means know ing w hom to sympathize w ith. Having served their function in the construction o f the hero ’s identity, Daniel Deronda s less-than-perfect Jews vanish into the fictional universe w hence they came.

6

Embodying Culture: Dorian’s Wish

I have argued th roughou t this book that, in scenes o f sympathy, identity takes shape as social identity: that w hen subjects confront each other across a social divide, the elements that define this boundary consti-tute— at least for a m om ent— their subjectivity M y discussions o f Daniel Deronda and The Picture o f Dorian Gray are concerned less w ith the at-tempts to sympathize across class lines that characterized earlier texts than w ith the way, in these la te-century novels, expressions o f personal affinity and desire also function as assertions o f cultural identity. Because late- n ine teen th -cen tu ry ideologies define identity increasingly in group term s— as, for instance, m em bership in a nation or in a sexual category— sympathy becom es m ore explicitly a m atter o f claim ing identity w ith, or distance from, such group identifications. Indeed, in these la te-n ine- teen th -cen tu ry texts expressions o f individual identity (identity that m ight be defined as difference from others) becom e increasingly difficult to differentiate from expressions o f cultural identity (identity defined as m em bership in a group). Thus the self Daniel D eronda develops during the course o f E liot s novel coincides neatly w ith his discovery o f his Jewish background, w hile D orian Gray s desires construct an avowedly symbolic identity, one that— for n ine teen th - and tw entieth-cen tury readers— em -bodies bo th la te-n ine teen th -cen tu ry aestheticism and m odern male h o -mosexuality. A t stake in these readings is the way the scene o f sympathy

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is also— and always— a scene o f cultural identification, in w hich the spec-ta to r’s identity is inseparable from an im agining o f the o th e r’s place; at stake as well is the way in w hich, w h en individual and cultural identity collapse into one another, the o ther w ith w h o m one sympathizes may tu rn ou t to be— as is the case, dramatically, in Dorian Gray— o n e’s self. A character w ho enacts the scene o f sympathy w ith in him self—indeed, o f w h o m it m ight be said that he sympathizes only w ith him self—D orian Gray bo th reinforces and extends the implications o f the scene o f sympa-thy as I have described it so far.

Dorian Gray's scene o f sympathy inheres in the contrast betw een the hero ’s idealized body and his fantasy o f that same body’s degradation, and in the way the novel positions these as alternative images o f cultural pos-sibility. T he contrast betw een the beautiful D orian and his hideous picture recapitulates the scene o f sympathy w ith w hich this book began: D orian ’s picture is a fantasy in w hich m oral decline rationalizes econom ic anxiety, m arking a safe distance betw een the subject w ho m ight fall and the one w ho already has. In this case, the identity-defin ing o ther— w ho is, o f course, D orian h im self—is manifestly bo th cultural fantasy and self-projection, a sim ultaneous internalization and anatom y o f the scene V ictorian fiction and V ictorian culture located on the streets.

T he constellation o f em otions D o rian ’s scene evokes— the tension be-tw een fascination, repulsion, and attraction, for instance, in his relation to the picture— recalls other, earlier versions o f the scene o f sympathy and the recurrent questions that surround it. W ith w hom , for example (or as w hom ) is the sympathetic spectator identified? W hat are the implications o f self-picturing— the replacem ent o f the self w ith a picture? W hy is identity figured as an econom ic configuration, an exchange betw een im -ages o f degradation and ideality? Foregrounding these questions, the nov-els also revises them . A ttributing m oral significance to the blots and marks the picture accumulates, Dorian Gray makes o f a paradigm atic aesthetic difference— the difference betw een beauty and ugliness— a paradigmatic cultural drama that, I w ish to argue, finds its echo in contem porary for-m ulations o f cultural and political identity. T he difference betw een D o rian ’s original w ish and his m em ory o f it, for instance— the difference betw een the impulsive expression o f a desire no t to age and a m oral nar-rative about sin and retribution— encapsulates the transform ation o f ex-

i 6 o The Aesthetics o f Cultural Identity

perience into narrative that, as we have just seen in Daniel Deronda, char-acterizes the fo rm ation o f cultural narratives. T h e dram a W ilde’s novel makes ou t o f the difference betw een beauty and ugliness— for example, the danger o f discovery, the obsessive checking and rechecking o f the p ic-ture, and the adventures in “low life” w hose m eaning D orian confirms on the surface o f the portrait as soon as he lives them — suggests the form a-tion o f cultural identity as a m oralization or rationalization o f aesthetic choices w hose m eaning m ight be revealed in, or m ight just as well be h id-den by, the face one chooses. Dorian Gray's scene o f sympathy suggestively figures, in several ways and w ith relevance to several different discourses, the aesthetic dim ension o f m odern and contem porary identities.1

N eith er person nor, exactly, character, D orian is, the novel tells us, a type: the “visible sym bol” o f the age.2 And, it has followed, the novel’s crit-ics have taken D orian— and W ilde him self—to be preem inent figures for and préfigurations o f aesthetic culture and m o d ern male hom osexual identity. B u t w hat happens at the in tersection o f character and cultural em bodim ent: w hat does it mean, as W alter B enn M ichaels asks, to im ag-ine a culture “in the form o f a person”?3

Toward the end o f the n ine teen th century, historians and theorists o f sexuality agree, the shaping activities o f m edicine and the law codified a variety o f activities and m odes o f being into an identity.4 In the form ula-

1 M y sense o f the way experience becomes cultural narrative, as argued here, is indebted to Walter Benn Michaels’s account o f cultural identities in Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). I refer to the transforma-tion o f events, actions, or choices (such as, for instance, the eating o f matzoh or the not- eating o f pork) into identity-producing narratives. See also Foucault’s narrative about the construction o f homosexuality as an identity in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (N ew York, Vintage, 1980), 101, and Linda D ow ling’s discussion o f the formation o f a homosexual cul-tural tradition in Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

2 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1985), 46. Subsequent references included in text.

3 Michaels, Our America, 80. Eve Sedgwick discusses “reading Dorian Gray from our twen- tieth-century vantage point where the name Oscar Wilde virtually means homosexual.” Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1990), 165. See also Ed Cohen, “Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet o f Representation,” PMLA 102 (October 1987): 801-13, and Jeff Nunokawa, “Homosexual Desire and the Effacement o f the Self in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” American Imago 49, no. 3 (1992): 311-21.

4 See, for example, Foucault, History of Sexuality.

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tions o f some recent critics, w hat happened is that at the end o f the cen-tury hom osexual persons, and hom osexual culture, becam e visible.

In the final week o f April 1895 Oscar Wilde stood in the prisoner’s dock o f the O ld Bailey, charged, in the dry words o f the indictment, w ith “acts o f gross indecency w ith another male person.” ... The prosecutor for the Crown explained to the ju ry in more vivid terms what this meant: Wilde and his co-defendant had jo ined in an “abominable traffic” in w hich young men were induced to engage in “giving their bodies, or sellingthem, to other men__ ” Wilde answered these charges, as is well known,in a speech o f sudden and impassioned energy. Passionately defending male love as the noblest o f attachments, a love “such as Plato made the very basis o f his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets o f Michelangelo and Shakespeare,” Wilde called it “pure” and “perfect” and “intellectual” . . . his superb self-possession and ringing peroration so electrifying that the courtroom listeners burst into spontaneous ap-plause. . . . The applause o f W ilde’s listeners marks the sudden emergence into the public sphere o f a m odern discourse o f male love formulated in the late Victorian period by such writers as Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds and Wilde himself, a new language o f moral legit-imacy pointing forward to Anglo-American decriminalization and, ulti-mately, a fully developed assertion o f homosexual rights.5

Thus, although Basil’s painting is entirely exterior to the text, it provides the reference point for a mode of representation that admits the visible, erotic presence of the male body.6

W hen Basil Hallward confesses his love for Dorian Gray, those who dwell under contemporary signs o f Hellenism cannot help but hear the open-ing notes o f their own song: “A while ago I went to a party . . . after I had been in the room about ten m inutes. . . I suddenly became conscious thatsomeone was looking at m e__ W hen our eyes met, I felt that I wasgrowing pale. A curious sensation o f terror came over me, I knew that I had come face to face w ith someone [w ho]. . . would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul__ I have always been my own master; had at least

5 Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality 1 -2.6 Cohen, “Writing Gone Wilde,” 806.

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always been so, till I met [him]__ Something seemed to tell me that Iwas on the verge o f a terrible crisis in my life.”7

Offered as originary m om ents in the instantiation o f m odern male ho m o -sexual identity, these scenes (from essays by Linda Dowling, Ed C ohen, and Jeff Nunokawa) may also be regarded as illustrations from a cultural history under construction. M om ents at w hich homosexuality is said, w ith some suddenness, to becom e visible, they manifestly dem onstrate the im aginary status o f cultural identity: they are opportunities for identification, places w here the self may imaginatively be located. These are no t just m om ents in the history o f a cultural identity, that is, bu t m irror scenes for the consti-tu tion o f one, delineating for reader, spectator, consumer, and critic w hat I wish to call the im aginary body o f culture. For rather than announcing that a particular identity has currency, visibility bestows that currency; and w hat “currency” means, in this sense, is availability for identification (“His at-traction to D orian Gray appears as nothing other than the first act o f the now well developed drama o f self-realization we call com ing o u t”).8 Registering the transform ation o f an image o f degradation into one o f ide-ality, o f the degraded object o f sympathy into a figure in w hose place any-one— theoretically, everyone— may see themselves, these images exchange a scene o f sympathy for one o f identification, replacing one kind o f sym-pathy (revulsion as secret sympathy; sympathy w ith society’s “victim ”) w ith another (sympathy as identification and desire, so that the o ther’s place be-comes one a reader m ight wish to occupy). For to enter into visibility is to give up some degree o f cultural difference at the very m om ent one claims it, to becom e part o f the com m on realm in w hich cultures (or, m ore pre-cisely, images o f cultural identity) circulate. As theorists o f the visible from Jean Baudrillard to Kaja Silverman have pointed out, rather than register-ing the em ergence into public light o f som ething already in existence, vis-ibility is that som ething, signaling the inseparability o f identity from its rep-resentations. Cultural identity is an identification w ith culture itself, bo th in its specific and m ore general form s.9

7 Nunokawa, “H omosexual Desire,” 312.8 Ibid.9 I am, o f course, aware o f the fact that same-sex desire was for the Victorians an occa-

sion more for revulsion than for sympathy. But I am relying both on the way in which identity politics depends upon a claim for victim status and on the blend o f sympathy and

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Franco M oretti, W erner Sollors, and others have described a shift in constructions o f identity during the eighteenth and n ineteen th centuries from the (more or less) given to the invented. Invoking B enedict A nderson’s idea o f im agined com m unities, for instance, Sollors describes the way, as aristocratic pow er declined in the eighteenth century, “ the im -m ediate connectedness o f the aristocracy was replaced by a m ediated form o f cohesion that depended, am ong o ther things, on literacy and ‘national’ (and ethnic) literatures.” Literature and the circulation o f p rin ted texts in general, A nderson argues, assist in the form ation o f com m unities circum -scribed less by b irth or te rrito ria l boundaries than by their m em bers’ shared know ledge.10

A nd im agined com m unities, o f course, require im agined identities— identities n o t lim ited (as the com m unities are not) to categories o f na-tionality or ethnicity. D ow ling’s history o f the O xford M ovem ent, for in -stance, w h ich traces the hom osocial codings o f the O xford Hellenistic tradition, bo th reveals the em bedding o f one culture in another and de-tails the m aking o f a new culture, a new group identity, ou t o f an already existing tradition. W hat D ow ling traces is, precisely, “the role o f V ictorian Hellenism in legitim ating hom osexuality as an identity.” 11 Yet still requir-ing explanation is the relationship betw een the previously uncodified in -dividual and the now codified group, since the form ation o f a new iden-tity is the form ation o f new identities, and the invention o f hom osexuality the invention o f persons deem ed homosexuals. If such form ations require new identities, that is, they also require the inculcation o f desire for those identities— and, as a corollary, the inculcation o f desire for identity itself.12

identification one might hear— and Dowling certainly hears— in the applause for W ilde s courtroom peroration.

10 Werner Sollors, The Invention of Ethnicity (N ew York: Oxford University Press, 1989), xxi.; Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

11 Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality, 31.12 Foucaults work has, o f course, explored in detail the means by which subjectivity is

produced through techniques such as confession and self-examination. M y concern here lies closer to the problem Judith Butler explores in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), when she asks what causes us to de-sire our own subjection (see 102).

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In response to a literary-critical tradition oblivious to the hom osexual or hom osocial con ten t o f literary texts, recent readings have been devoted the act o f decoding. In the case o f The Picture o f Dorian Gray; the goal has been to re tu rn the novel to its specific historical and sexual context, read-ing against w hat Eve Sedgwick calls the “alibi o f abstraction” : the abstract moralism, the evacuated sexuality, o f its standard in terpretations.13 Yet the abstractions on w hich W ilde’s novel relies, the em pty term s o f its codings, and perhaps above all its definitive binarism (beauty / ugliness) are u n -avoidable; it is, after all, the affiliation betw een the aristocratic male body and the abstraction “beauty” that allows for the tex t’s general currency. R egarded as one o f m odern hom osexual identity’s m ost im portant icons, D orian Gray is also a paradigmatic image o f masculine beauty and desir-ability. In re turn ing some degree o f abstraction to the novel’s in terpreta-tion, therefore— or at least re tu rn ing to the abstractions on w hich the novel relies— I wish to locate desire for D orian , and D o rian ’s desire, w ith in a m ore inclusive eroticization o f identity: one in w hich D o rian ’s w ish to change places w ith his p icture reveals identity itself, here allegorized as culture’s visible form , to be one o f the m odern subject’s m ost sought-after objects o f desire. Thus the la te-n ine teen th-cen tury ideology that, follow-ing Foucault’s logic, is said to have redefined self in term s o f sexuality— in w hich “w ho I am ” becom es “w hat I w an t”— is here reim agined w ith o n -tology as desire’s subject, so that w hat is w anted is, precisely, “w ho I am ” : identity itself.

D o rian ’s identity inheres in— is m ade o f—the contrast and active in ter-change betw een the novel’s constructions o f beauty and ugliness, and in -terpretations tend to rest on the meanings attributed to each.14 Yet it has

13 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 164.14 To raise the issue o f the novel’s aesthetic context is also to raise that o f its relation to

the aesthetic movement. What is important about the movement, for the purposes o f this reading, is its exposure o f the role played by aesthetics in Victorian structures o f identity, for rather than making identity into an aesthetic issue, the aesthetic movement revealed that it already was one. W ilde’s novel has always presented a signal critical problem: how can it be the case that such a resolutely antimoralistic novel is so relentlessly moralistic? Dorian s fate seems to confirm Victorian morality’s counter-aesthetic position: beauty, it insists, is definable only in moral terms. And yet in playing out such a paradigmatically

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never been no ted that the m oral w eight the picture com es to bear during the course o f the novel— the m eaning D orian him self comes to attribute to it— is far rem oved from the initial w him sy that brings it in to being. Here, from the m iddle o f the novel, is D o rian ’s recollection o f his wish: “H e had uttered a m ad wish that he him self m ight rem ain young, and the face on the canvas bear the burden o f his passions and sins; that the painted image m ight be seared w ith the lines o f suffering and th o u g h t” (119). B ut w hat he actually says (at the novel’s beginning) is this: “ If it were I w ho was always to be young, and the p icture that was to grow old!” (49). D o rian ’s wish for an exchange is itself exchanged, his original, impulsive desire for youth and his aversion to aging replaced by a m orally charged scenario in w hich the picture becom es the bearer o f “passions and sins.” A nd this exchange, or false m em ory, is actually true to the novel’s eco-nom ics o f degradation, since, as the picture alters, w hat matters is no t the type o f action com m itted— not the k ind o f “degradation”— but rather (as if such m atters w ere codifiable, and self-evidently so) the am ount. T he picture pictures accum ulation, displaying n o t the detail o f experience bu t the fact o f it (we can’t know, from looking at it, w hat experience it records— as the history o f the novel’s reception, and the continuing need to decode the picture, suggests).

For D orian , sin, old age, suffering, and even “ th o u g h t” are rendered equivalent in a generalized picture o f degradation that looks like this: “T he cheeks w ould becom e hollow or flaccid, yellow crows’ feet w ould creep round the fading eyes and make them horrible. T he hair w ould lose its brightness, the m ou th w ould gape or droop, w ould be foolish or gross, as the m ouths o f old m en are. T here w ould be the w rink led throat, b lue- veined hands, the tw isted body, that he rem em bered in the grandfather w ho had been so stern to h im in his b o yhood” (153). O r maybe this: “Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, w ith a knife in his heart. H e was w ithered, w rinkled, and loathsom e o f visage. It was no t until they exam ined the rings that they recognized w ho it was” (264).

Victorian identity drama, the novel suggests the extent to which identity was, for the Victorians, an aesthetic category For in insisting on the collapse between Dorian and his picture at its end— the novel’s most quintessentially Victorian gesture—‘W ilde suggests that Dorian’s tragedy is largely a tragedy o f beauty: one that inheres in the disparity be-tween exterior and interior values. The aesthetic movement, then, rather than being Victorian morality’s opposite, develops that morality’s implicit aesthetic.

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T he speculations o f the first passage (“ the m o u th w ould gape and d roop”) are, for all intents and purposes, fulfilled by the second. And, in tru th , as the picture reduces all degradation to a com m on currency, that o f ugliness, it exposes the surprising presum ption, given the subtleties o f taste D orian comes to embody, that w hen it comes to ugliness there is no ques-tion o f taste (at least for W ilde’s readers— in this sense bo th the picture and the book express a w idely shared fantasy about ugliness). Age and sin, the novel’s language suggests in its circulation o f ugliness term s— “hideous,” “horrib le,” “w rink led”— are interchangeable n o t only w ith each other bu t also w ith o ther forms o f the “loathsome,” such as the figure o f the “ho rrid old Jew ” w ho owns the theater in w hich Sibyl Vane per-forms, or the grandfather o f w h o m D orian has “hateful m em ories.”

D o rian ’s beauty similarly lacks specificity; like his ugliness, w h ich at-taches itself indistinguishably to the figures “old” and “Jew,” it bo th evokes and denies specific affiliations. For despite the possibility o f nam ing those affiliations— Sedgwick, for instance, contrasts W ilde’s middle-class Irish- ness w ith D o rian ’s aristocratic Englishness, w hile for D ow ling D o rian ’s beauty has a H ellenic textual history— w ith in its im m ediate social and cultural context, the novel’s ideal o f beauty (“gold hair, blue eyes, rose-red lips”) constitutes an evacuation o f meaning: it is m eant to signify no th ing o ther than beauty itself.15 Thus binding together its ideal o f beauty w ith its exchangeable images o f degradation, the novel forecloses its ow n cele-bration o f insincerity as a m ultiplication o f personalities into a stark divi-sion and accountability: the difference betw een beauty and ugliness.

D orian ’s relation to his picture has, o f course, been theorized in many ways, no t the least powerful o f w hich rely on the m oral term s the novel itself provides. F iguring D o rian ’s identity in an econom y o f appearances, however— as the difference and exchange betw een beauty and ugliness— the novel allows for another k ind o f interpretation, one that has m ore to do w ith its role in a history o f cultural identities than w ith the history o f its literary interpretations. For the difference betw een beauty and ugliness per se participates in the underlying binarism o f certain m odern cultural narratives o f identity, narratives that depend less on specific details o f iden-tity than on the positive or negative valuation o f identities: the positing o f

15 Eve Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 151; Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality; 150.

Embodying Culture 1 6 j

desire or its absence. Such narratives, that is, resolve w hat m ight be a m ul-tiplicity o f identities in to a choice betw een identities, in the form o f a difference betw een self and other. A nd this difference, I w ish to argue, in tu rn reflects the condition o f belonging o r no t belonging to a group. Em bodying the imaginative possibilities o f the scene o f sympathy as I have described it, îo r instance, the contrast betw een beautiful and ugly images of D o rian Gray reproduces the aesthetics of contem porary identity poli-tics, in w hich identity takes shape as the difference betw een negative and positive cultural projections. Identity politics attempts to bestow value on identities the dom inant culture devalues: it attempts to transform ugliness (a particular identity as perceived by the dom inant culture) in to beauty (that same identity, as projected in response by the group so nam ed), and its m echanism is the transformative pow er o f the idea— and im age— o f the group. In the “ iden tity” o f identity politics, the individual and the group function as reflexes and projections o f each other— m utually con-stitutive images— w ith the group functioning as the engine o f the desire for identity, the body ou t o f w hich individual bodies are made. Indeed, it is because o f the similarity betw een the ideologically constructed iden ti-ties o f the late n ineteen th century, the image m aking o f identity politics, and Dorian Grays figuration o f identity as an interplay betw een valued and devalued images o f the self that, in W ilde’s novel, “we may catch the early strains o f an identity politics w hose anthem will eventually becom e loud enough to make itself heard even on Saint Patrick’s Day.” 16 Even as the novel refers to a specific politics, however, the aesthetic fo rm by means o f w hich that politics is represented— its reliance on an idealized image o f masculine identity— makes the character D orian Gray w idely available for identification: for, at the very least, “literary” sympathy.

M y argum ent thus situates Dorian Gray in the contex t o f la te-n ine- teen th -cen tu ry ideologies that may be viewed as precursors o f a m odern symbolic politics o f identity: ideologies in w hich the individual is w ith in -

16 Nunokawa,“Homosexual Desire,” 313. Dowling recognizes, implicitly, the role o f the group in the transforming o f homosexuality’s image: “Such writers as Symonds and Pater and W ilde. . . find the opening in which ‘homosexuality’ might begin to be understood as itself a mode o f self-development and diversity, no longer a sin or crime or disastrous civic debility but a social identity functioning within a fund o f shared human potentialities, now recognized as shared” (Hellenism and Homosexuality, 31).

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creasing frequency im agined as a m em ber o f a group. R elevant here is the Foucauldian account o f a shift from action to essence in the form ulation o f n ineteen th -cen tu ry identities. B ut m ore useful is the m odel o f nation-alism, w hich serves as a general m odel o f identity from the n ine teen th century onward, and w hich accounts for b o th the affective passion and the dom inant trope o f male bonding in Daniel Deronda and Dorian Gray. For nationalist ideology positions identity as the culm ination o f a narrative o f desire and an effect o f group m em bership; in it, desire for group m em -bership is indistinguishable from desire for identity per se (thus the rele-vance, once more, o f Julia Kristeva’s description o f nationalism as a condi-tion in w hich “ to b e ” is “to belong”). In this context, D o rian ’s w ish to change places w ith his ow n idealized image may be understood no t only as a desire to be an object o f desire, or as a desire for a particular identity, bu t m ore fundam entally as a desire for identity itself.

Je ff N unokaw a w rites that the achievem ent o f W ilde’s novel was to give m odern hom osexual identity a hum an face.17 A nd indeed, the novel ac-complishes this w ith precisely the kind o f narrative sleight o f hand that, belying the direction o f the narrative itself, enables N unokaw a s com m ent to pass w ith o u t eliciting the obvious questions: how, exactly, “hu m an ”? and, m ore compellingly, w hich “face”? T he conversion o f loss into gain the novel effects— the way the enduring im age o f the beautiful D orian emerges (if one agrees that it does) from an ostensible narrative o f de-cline— resembles w hat m ight be called the conversion narrative o f iden-tity politics: D orian dies into representation, his beauty, prefiguring w hat D ow ling refers to as the current w ide acceptance o f hom osexuality by the dom inant culture, functioning as a kind o f projection into the future: an invitation to the transform ation o f the image o f hom osexuality itself.18 T he novel’s erotics, I thus wish to suggest, is finally a cultural one, and its language o f sexual desire supports a narrative o f cultural desire, a desire for cultural em bodim ent (the same desire, expressed as bo th an attraction to -ward and revulsion against an “object” o f sympathy, that, I have suggested, shapes earlier scenes o f sympathy). D o rian ’s wish is a wish for beauty, bu t D o rian ’s beauty is a figure for the desirability o f a certain m odern

17 Nunokawa, “Homosexual Desire,” 313.18 Dowling locates W ilde at the origin o f “the modern emergence o f homosexuality as

a positive social identity” (ibid., xvi).

configuration o f identity: for the achievem ent o f identity as a place in a cultural narrative.19

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In his book on the politics o f A m erican identity, Our America, W alter Michaels takes aim at w hat he calls the essentialist bias o f all accounts o f cultural identity: the way in w hich, in his words, these accounts “under-stand culture as a k ind o f person.”20 To understand culture as a kind o f person is, for Michaels, to tie actions to essence, identifying oneself w ith ancestors w hose experiences and m em ories one did no t share. To no good end, cultures are im agined to possess identity, argues Michaels, and inher-ent value is (therefore) attributed to their survival.

B ut how is it that a set o f practices (his definition o f culture) comes to be identified w ith personhood? H ow do habits acquire the nim bus o f identity; w hy is the sum m ore than its parts? (Or, how is it that “m odern hom osexual iden tity” comes to acquire a “face,” and w hat does it m ean that it does?) O n e answer, as I have suggested, m ight lie in Foucault’s dis-cussion o f the way la te-n ine teen th -cen tu ry medical and ju rid ical dis-courses transform ed practice into identity, m aking “possible the form ation o f a ‘reverse’ discourse: hom osexuality began to speak in its ow n behalf, to dem and that its legitim acy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by w hich it was medically disqualified.”21 W hile this form ulation begs the question, since rather than explaining personification, it personifies— “hom osexuality began to speak in its ow n behalf”— it nevertheless suggests that desirable images o f cul-

19 It is, o f course, important that the paradigmatic representation o f this desire is figured as the difference between beautiful and ugly male bodies. As Sedgwick writes, almost everything in the late nineteenth century takes this form: “In the development toward eu-genic thought around and after the turn o f the century, reifications such as ‘the strong,’ ‘the weak,’ ‘the nation,’ ‘civilization,’ particular classes, ‘the race,’ and even ‘life’ itself have as-sumed the vitalized anthropomorphic outlines o f the individual male body and object o f medical expertise” (Epistemology of the Closet, 178). I want to emphasize both the cultural specificity o f Dorian Gray’s images and what might be called the novel’s will to abstract-ness: the way the opposition between beauty and ugliness encapsulates the binary con-struction o f identity in identity politics,

20 Michaels, Our America, 180.21 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 101.

170 The Aesthetics o f Cultural Identity

tural identity em erge in response to, and are inseparable from, w hat Jud ith B utler calls the “injurious te rm ” that gives a particular identity its nam e— the te rm that, in the Althusserian scenario o f interpellation, calls it into being.22 A nd it suggests, too, via the rhetoric o f personification, the role group identity plays in this identity-form ing narrative: that it is possible to speak on o n e’s behalf only w hen identity is defined in collective term s, as som ething shared w ith others.

If we pursue the im plications o f Foucault’s narrative, in w hich conflicting images o f identity exist in necessary relation to one another, then W ilde’s p ic ture-painting scene— the scene in w hich D orian recog-nizes him self “as if for the first tim e”— begins to resemble a positive alter-native to the Althusserian scenario in w hich the subject is hailed as a sub-je c t o f the law. Indeed, the scene provides a response, in the form o f a counternarrative, to the question B utler poses about A lthusser’s scenario: “W hy should I tu rn around?”23

The lad started, as if awakened from some dream. “Is it really finished?” H e murmured, stepping down from the platform.

“Quite finished,” said the painter. “And you have sat splendidly today.I am awfully obliged to you.”

“That is entirely due to me,” broke in Lord Henry.“Isn’t it, Mr. Gray?” Dorian made no answer, but passed listlessly in front o f his picture, and

turned towards it. W hen he saw it he drew back, and his cheeks flushed for a m om ent w ith pleasure. A look o f joy came into his eyes, as if he had recognized himself for the first time. (48)

For Butler, such an invitation is itself com pelling: the subject turns, de-spite his or her ostensible guilt, because identity is an offer that cannot be refused. W ilde’s version, im agined as response or resistance to this scene, reproduces its fo rm bu t no t its content: D o rian ’s response to the picture enacts a fantasy o f self-hailing, in w hich the self answers to its ow n desire rather than to the adm onito ry call o f the law. W h at seems im portan t, then , is n o t the undecidable status o f the self that turns (must n o t that self—so the question goes— already be a subject in o rder to turn?) bu t

22 Butler, Psychic Life of Power; 104.23 Ibid., 108.

Embodying Culture 171

rather the fact o f the scene’s replication: the way b o th A lthusser and W ilde figure the production o f identity as a tu rn , im agining identity as that w hich, in a narrative o f desire, the subject moves toward. W hat com -pels and confers identity, in b o th these scenarios, is n o th ing o ther than desire for it.24

A nd that desire, once again, is the desire to belong. T he self hailed here, as in Althusser, is not, no r can it be, w holly self-appointed: it is rather the effect o f the existence o f the group, o f society. For if, as B utler suggests, the desire for identity is the desire to be constituted socially, then identity m ust take shape as the image o f social life.25 A nd so it does in Dorian Gray. In a discussion preceding D orian ’s arrival, Lord H enry W otton and Basil Hallward discuss the partial nature o f their ow n and others’ identities: one possesses intellect and talent, another beauty, another wealth (“Your rank and wealth, H arry; my brains, such as they are— m y art, w hatever it may be w orth; D orian Gray’s good looks”). D orian , in this conversation, is said to possess only beauty: “H e is some brainless, beautiful creature, w ho should always be here in w in ter w h en we have no flowers to look at” (25), and w hen he appears he is indeed depicted as no t yet in possession o f an identity— as em pty and available for one.Yet at the end o f this scene— the scene in w hich Basil paints the famous portrait— D orian possesses all the qualities Henry, Basil, and form erly D orian him self possessed individually. Indeed, the apparent fluidity o f identity boundaries in this scene is coun-tered by the way D o rian ’s identity emerges as the only one that counts (there are three bodies here, bu t finally only one identity), and he is no t only an image o f the others’ desire bu t an em bodim ent o f their very qual-ities: o f Basil’s images and H en ry ’s words.

24 The very problem o f the subject’s status in Althusser’s scenario suggests the answer I propose in this chapter: the subject, “already” one, locates subjecthood outside the self be-cause cultural identity, which appears in such scenarios as identity tout court, is an external construct.

25 “Called by an injurious name, I come into social being, and because I have a certain inevitable attachment to my existence, because a certain narcissism takes hold o f any term that confers existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they consti-tute me socially” (Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 104). “Existence,” in this formulation, is the same as being constituted socially: life is equated with cultural life, with existing within a the context o f a social group.

26 Lee Edelman, Homographesis (N ew York: Routledge, 1994), 17.

172 The Aesthetics o f Cultural Identity

As Lee Edelm an has argued, W ilde’s novel inscribes identity in a narra-tive o f desire.26 From the novel’s initial representations o f D orian as beau-tiful vacancy and potential, to the “lo o k ” that comes in to the lad’s face that Basil had never seen there before, to D o rian ’s “ recognition” o f him self in the portrait, identity is som ething D orian achieves in the p ic ture-painting scene, and it is the result no t ju st o f his ow n wish, bu t o f the com bined yearnings o f all three. In these scenes, the group is im agined as a body, each m em ber possessing some aspect o f the w hole, and D orian is the projected image o f that w hole— a com posite body. It is this wholeness that he rec-ognizes as if for the first tim e in the portrait, this wholeness that makes the picture the place he wants to occupy. Desire for D orian— including D o rian ’s desire for him self as picture— is desire for the im agined w hole-ness o f the group. Indeed, it is the impossibility o f distinguishing betw een desire for a particular individual and desire for cultural em bodim ent that D o rian ’s wish to change places w ith the picture defines, and that defines the picture o f D orian Gray.

Thus w hen D o rian ’s image appears on the canvas, the very picture o f Basil’s desire for h im and o f H en ry ’s influence, no t only does the novel dramatize w hat Ed C ohen has called the inscription o f hom oerotic desire, bu t it also allegorizes the em ergence o f cultural identity per se as an effect o f triangulated desire. It is the idea o f culture that takes shape here in, and as, an im aginary body, and the idea o f the group— o f the self as an ideal-ized projection o f others— that enables the replacem ent, or at least the overlapping, o f the injurious nam e w ith the beautiful face. If the police-m an’s call is the call o f the dom inant culture, defining the respondent as guilty before the law, the alternative picture illustrates the reverse fantasy, or fantasy o f reversal: it is an allegory o f being interpellated as an object o f desire. Collapsing the difference Freud w ished to maintain, in his discus-sion o f homosexuality, betw een desire for and possession o f the other, it suggests a fantasy o f such perfect sympathy w ith the o ther that the o ther turns out to be, for better or worse, the self.27

Producing D o rian ’s idealized image, the painting scene thus allegorizes the elem ent o f desire that transforms practice into personhood. For a set

27 For a discussion o f this issue in relation to Freud s construction o f homosexuality, see Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (NewYork: Routledge, 1995), 12, 19.

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o f practices does no t constitute a culture: only a set o f practices endow ed w ith m eaning and value does. A nd such a set o f practices, as M ichaels’s ar-gum ent suggests, takes an em bodied form : culture is always w hat som eone else (even, as Dorian Gray makes clear, o ne’s ow n self im agined as som e-one else) is doing. C ulture is n o t a “set” o f practices (M ichaels’s definition) bu t rather a reading o f them : an in terpretation that unifies disparate prac-tices, attaching m eaning to action and in this way individualizing it, w ith the idea o f the individual— o f actions perform ed by som eone— giving co-herence to the activity o f the group. D orian Gray thus figures in this ar-gum ent as an exemplary image o f a person w ho is also an em bodim ent o f culture— an em bodim ent o f a particular culture, to be sure, bu t also an al-legory for the way culture in general takes shape “as a k ind o f person.”

B ut w hat kind o f culture, and w hat k ind o f person? T h e rhetoric o f ex-change— specifically, o f changing places— that inform s D o rian ’s wish and structures his story further reinforces the im portance o f the idea o f cul-ture in the im agining o f m odern identities. For the self, even w hen im ag-ined as o ne’s ow n, is constituted w ith reference to an external image. It is p ictured elsewhere: in D orian Gray’s case, in the form o f an image readily available w ith in and appropriated from the dom inant culture (an image, w e m ight go so far as to say, o f the dom inant culture. For the beautiful face, m aking no secret o f its desirability, defines the dom inant culture’s re-quirem ents for beauty; hence its class determ ination: aristocratic— and its national one: English). D orian symbolizes his era in m ore ways than one: his beauty is no m ore idealized w ith in the context o f his coterie than in V ictorian England generally, and it is the abstractness o f that beauty, o f course— the protean significance o f his cultural ideality— that enables no t only D orian, bu t the novel itself, to “pass.”

A nd here the narrative o f identity politics gives way— briefly— to that o f cosmetology: to the very real (no longer magical, that is) business o f choosing a face.

D orian wishes, o f course, for bo th faces, the beautiful and the ugly— n o t for one or the other, but rather for the exchange betw een them . A nd his desire is fulfilled n o t just by the beautiful face b u t by the ugly one, w ith its marks and blotches, as well— and by the way each supplem ents the other, each suggests m eanings the o ther fails to provide. For despite the exchangeability o f images discussed earlier in this chapter, W ilde s novel does attribute value to ugliness. As part o f the narrative culm inating in

174 The Aesthetics o f Cultural Identity

D o rian ’s death, the picture evinces the tem porality he rejects: it ages, w rin -kles, degrades. B ut it also reflects a process o f accum ulation: the portrait turns sin into gain by rendering it visible. This is, after all, w here D o rian ’s actions appear, w here his experience accumulates like capital. Like a miser visiting his wealth, D orian obsessively checks his profits, each blotch and w rink le challenging the novel’s m oralizing w ith an equally com pelling logic o f accum ulation. D espite the absence o f individuality the novel’s general representation o f ugliness suggests, then, the accum ulation o f marks on the p ic ture’s surface does suggest the possibility o f individuality: here, at least, som ething is happening. W hy, then, is it no t a pretty picture?

In the M urad advertisem ent (Fig. i), an advertisem ent for a w rink le- rem oving cream for w om en and a suggestive updating and revision o f D orian Gray’s picture, the lines on the w om an’s face are replaced by— are, indeed, only visible as— the advertiser’s lines, labeled w ith the contents o f a cultural narrative (and directed toward bo th the w om an’s image and the spectator— “the day you totaled the car”): the projected replacem ent o f one face w ith another replaces one narrative w ith another. T he face (and, indeed, the identity o f its owner) is thus figured as a k ind o f map, each m ark rendering experience visible, denoting a site at w h ich som ething happened. B ut o f course rather than simply m aking the invisible visible, the marks denote the absence o f anything but cultural narrative: the map, like D o rian ’s hideous portrait, figures the inseparability o f “real” self and cultural projection.

Since identity becom es visible only w hen m arked as cultural narrative, bo th identities— the ugly (or less desirable) and the beautiful— appear as pictures (hence, as in my analysis o f “A Christmas Carol,” visibility itself signals and evokes desire, the distance betw een the self and its representa-tions) .Yet the fantasy, and the parallel in contem porary culture, is that one can participate in (embody) cultural value w ithou t giving up o ne’s true self. In the advertisem ent as in W ilde’s novel the “ugly” self occupies the position o f the real, and is similarly im agined as detachable: that to w hich one necessarily refers, o n e’s undesirable face is also— as in V ictorian scenes o f sympathy— that w hich one need n o t (but for the grace o f God, and plastic surgery) acknowledge, or, indeed, be. And, again as in Dorian Gray; and Deronda as well, the ugly face is the particularized face, the attractive face generalized— its evacuation o f experience rendering it available for a

Fig. i . T he marks o f experience: Dorian Gray revisited.

i j 6 The Aesthetics o f Cultural Identity

spectators projections.28 (The fem ininity o f this example is thus relevant to the novel’s construction o f D orian s identity as sympathetic, for here as in Daniel Deronda sym pathetic identity is equated w ith generalized and fem inized identity, w ith the visual cues that conventionally invite a spec-ta to r’s identification and fantasy)

W hat happens, then, to the self one does not want to be— the self whose identifications are, or have been, refused? This advertisem ent’s persuasive-ness relies on its ability to appeal to a spectator w ho wants to erase, but also values, experience’s marks: w ith its labels insisting on the very debilities the cream is to erase, the ad suggests no t exactly (or no t only) the effacement o f experience but rather its dem aterialization or internalization. Like Dorian Gray; it offers the spectator an opportunity to em body the cultural ideal yet preserve an alternative, “authentic” self—not exactly keeping the body that records that experience, but rather maintaining as m ental picture the m em -ory o f such a body (though perhaps w ith less energy than one devotes to actively maintaining, or attem pting to achieve, the culturally idealized one). D orian ’s obsessive return to his hideous image— the way he commits his “sins” in a spirit o f scientific inquiry in order to gauge their effect on the picture (124), and m ore tellingly the way he finds him self “enam oured” o f it (135)— suggests a similar desire for a self that isn’t picture perfect: a self one can call one s own* For the attraction o f the ugly self, here as in the case o f H ugh Boone, that hideous m an w ith the twisted lip, is the lure o f authen^ ticity: o f the cultural authority granted the idea o f the true self R ead thus, as a narrative about a choice o f cultural narratives, W ilde’s novel may appear to be less about sin— either sin in general or any particular variety— than it is about the eroticization o f particular images o f cultural identity and o f the idea o f cultural identity itself.29

28 Here, as in Daniel Deronda, it becomes evident that the generalized character— the type— is by definition a sympathetic object, the projection o f a collective fantasy about the group’s desires and about the way it views, or wishes to view, itself.

29 Even as the m edical/juridical establishment creates a type, D ow ling’s analysis sug-gests, a cultural tradition for that type emerges— deliberately and self-consciously, using as its framework another, previously existing tradition. The form that the “coded counterdis-course” o f homosexuality takes, in D ow ling’s reading (Hellenism and Homosexuality, xv), literalizes my claim in this chapter— the claim that culture is always someone else s— at the same time that it deconstructs the idea o f an “original” tradition by suggesting that tradi-tions always emerge in discourse with one another.

Embodying Culture 177

T he idea o f culture invests a single person’s actions w ith the identity, or shared m eaning, o f the group; pu t another way, in cultural identity the identity o f the group is discernible— made palpable— in a single person’s actions. Culture, according to this logic, is always em bodied, always a m at-ter o f value manifested in som eone’s appearance, som eone’s place. Indeed, as a m atter o f im agining the o ther as a person w ith w h o m one w ould like to change places (“ I w ish I could change places w ith you, D orian,” says Lord H enry wistfully [256]), cultural identity collapses person into place: identity becom es a cultural position, a place one can occupy. A nd just as culture depends on the illusion that a practice is m ore than a practice, so too does changing places substitute being for doing— so that culture makes itself, and reproduces itself, by substituting identity for practice, im agining practice in em bodied form . T he scenario o f “changing places” short-circuits a scenario o f im itation (I do w hat you do) w ith a scenario o f replaced identity (I becom e you, pu t myself in your place) in w hich identity, seemingly kept intact, in fact is revealed as no th ing m ore than a function o f place. P ictured outside the self, the identity one wants— w hich one wants because it is pictured— appears knowable and available for oc-cupation. (In the w orld according to Dorian Gray— the w orld that, the M urad ad tells us, we still inhabit— there is always a m ore desirable version o f “y ou” out there.) “C hanging places” replaces narrative and tem porality w ith substitution and magic, exchanging a condition o f desire in w hich identity is always slipping away w ith one in w hich identity is to be had for the asking— or the wishing.

Even as it is said to signal the new visibility, the em ergence into public light, o f late-V ictorian hom osexual culture, then, The Picture o f Dorian Gray allegorizes the general desire that transforms practice in to culture, that marks the difference betw een practice and culture. C ulture appears here as a structure in w hich practices have m eaning precisely because, and only because, som eone else is perform ing them .30 W hy is it, I have asked o f Foucault’s account o f n ineteen th -cen tu ry identities, that individuals no t only accept the term s o f their m edicalization, but they take on those iden-tities, begin to speak “in their ow n behalf”? T he eroticization and ideal-ization o f group identity in the projection o f an im aginary body figures cu lture’s invitation to spectators to recognize themselves— and seek to

30 This formulation is obviously indebted to R ené Girard’s idea o f triangular desire.

178 The Aesthetics o f Cultural Identity

place themselves— in a symbolic structure not o f their own creation. Dorian s beauty signals the (illusory) achievement o f an identification with culture itself: it is the beauty o f identity as wish-fulfillment, a fantasy o f experience invested with value. Desire for Dorian captures the lure o f cul-tural narrative as the context in which, at a historical m om ent w hich is ours as much as Dorian Gray s, self-recognition can and does take place. Identity as this novel figures it— and, I have suggested, in contemporary identity politics as well— is the imagined occupation o f a place in a cul-tural narrative, a place that takes visible form as an imaginary body whose identification with the group gives new meaning to the visual fullness o f the Lacanian imaginary.

Diana Fuss has defined identity politics as “the tendency to base one s politics on a sense o f personal identity— as gay, as Jewish, as Black, as fe-male.”31 But this definition classifies as personal what are obviously terms o f group affiliation, terms whose appropriation guarantees visibility in the symbolic realms o f culture and politics. In the m odel I have described here, identity politics is reconceived, following the m odel o f late- nineteenth-century ideologies, as the creation o f a desirable identity, its mechanism the projection o f that identity in an imaginary body. That same desire for visibility— without, o f course, the accompanying political concern— is manifest in the desire to embody a spectacularized, mass- producèd version o f beauty. In both cases, cultural identity takes shape as an implicit opposition between images o f ideality and degradation; in both, identity is constituted as an exchange between identities— identities imagined, finally, as different versions o f the self.

The body imagined as desirable, I have suggested, is the body o f cul-ture: a projection o f the image o f culture itself as an imaginary body. Such a formation depends not just on the desirability o f particular identities but on the positing o f identity itself as desirable: as that with which everyone must identify, that which everyone must desire. Thus embodied, identity presents itself as something to be desired, something to be wished for, something others could imagine being. Imagining identity as a body whose place a spectator may wish to occupy, and as a person with w hom one might like to change places, W ilde s novel renders visible the element

31 Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking (N ew York: R outledge, 1994), 103.

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o f desire— and the transformations o f sympathy— out o f w hich cultures are made.

T he sympathetic spectator does no t, as w e have seen, sympathize w ith everyone— least o f all w hen sympathy is explicitly linked to self- identification, as in identity politics. In this way, identity politics calls into question the ostensible universality, or blankness, o f the ethical, liberal sub-jec t— the subject, as E liot demonstrates in Daniel Deronda, w hose identity is m eant to transcend the logic o f group identity on w hich it is founded. In E lio t’s novel as in W ilde’s, and elsewhere in this book, the rhetoric o f exchangeability and im personality on w hich liberal subjectivity rests— the equalizing gesture o f “ there but for the grace o f G o d ”— is circum scribed by the particularity o f the subject’s identifications. F rom this perspective, the illustration from A dam Sm ith w ith w hich I began— his con ten tion that, try as we m ight to im agine ourselves in ano ther’s place, we are lim -ited to the evidence o f our ow n experiences— may be new ly understood to suggest the way claims for the imaginative possibilities o f sympathy in W estern liberal though t are underm ined by the very structures o f group identity w ith in w hich m odern identities are im agined.

To return, then, to M ichaels’s problem w ith the personification o f cul-ture: the problem (if it is one) is no t that we im agine culture as a person, and that we could have it some o ther way T he problem is that culture is, essentially, the im agining o f the self in another’s place (or, as in Dorian Gray in another place): a fantasy o f participating in an experience that has m ean-ing precisely because it is em bodied, because it is— at least figuratively— som eone else’s. A nd the logic o f culture, at least in this account— involv-ing as it does the externalization o f identity, the nagging feeling that o ne’s real self is really som ewhere else— is sympathy’s logic as well. T here is no less desire in the eye that turns toward the beggar than there is in D orian Gray’s eye as it turns toward his beautiful picture, for to the extent that the beggar figures the “tru th ” o f middle-class identity, and allows for the con-struction o f an idealized, culturally valued alternative, his gaze will attract that o f the subject w ho, professedly, w ould rather look away.

Index

“A Christmas Carol.” See Dickens, Charles

Agnew,Jean-Christophe, 3n Althusser, Louis, 6 , 12n, 38-40,170-71 Altick, Richard, io in Anderson, Amanda, i7n, 89 Anderson, Benedict, i24n, I36n, 138,142,

163Armstrong, Nancy, I7n, 105 Auerbach, Nina, H2n

Bailin, Miriam, 9n, 19 Baudrillard, Jean, 37n, 162 Bennett, Tony, I24n Bersani, Leo, 148 Bowlby, Rachel, 3n Brand, Dana, 3n, I9n Brownstein, Rachel, 15 on Butler,Judith, i63n, 170-71

Capitalism: and exchange, 7; and humani- tarianism, 43; and identity, 1-3, 5 -7 ,9 , 11-12,43-47,49-51; and sensibility, 45-46. See also Identity; Subject

Chase, Cynthia, 128,133-36,138-40

Cohen, Ed, i6on, 161 , i 6 2 n , 172

Collins, Philip, 46n Crary, Jonathan, 4n Crosby, Christina, I 2 8 n , I 3 5 n , I 5 6 n

Culture: as collection o f signs, 2 8 ; com -modity, 4 2 —45; “in the form o f a per-son,” 1 6 0 - 6 1 , 1 6 8 - 6 9 , 1 7 1 - 7 3 , 1 7 8 - 7 9 ;

high/low in Daniel Deronda, 1 4 9 - 5 1 ;

homosexual, 161, 177; and identity, 12,

1 6 2 , 1 6 9 - 7 0 , 1 7 3 ; as image, 4 1 - 4 2 . See also Identity

Cvetkovich, Ann, 96n, I46n, i47n, 15on

Daniel Deronda. See Eliot, George Davis, Paul, 29, 33, 42n, 45n DeBolla, Peter, 4n, ion Debord, Guy, 3n, 28 DeLauretis, Theresa, 40n Desire: for identity: 150,163-64,170-71;

for middle-class life, 106-8; and specta-torship, 33-37

Dickens, Charles: “A Christmas Carol,” 8 -9 ,12 , 2 0 -21 ,27 -46 ,96 ,107; Hard Times, 15; Dombey and Son, 58n; Our Mutual Friend, 50, 58n

l 8 l

182 Index

Doane, Mary Ann, 5n, 33, 95n Dowling, Linda, i6on, 161, i62n, 163,166,

16711, i68n, I76n Doyle, Arthur Conan: “The Man with the

Twisted Lip,” 21, 47—73, I27n; Memories and Adventures, 6411

Eagleton, Terry, 137East Lynne. See Wood, EllenEdelman, Lee, 172Ehrenreich, Barbara, 87Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 42nEisenstein, Sergei, 27Eliot, George: Daniel Deronda, 12-13,

18, 20-22, 78, 121-57, !58, 176; Middlemarch, 130; “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!,” 137

Elliot, Jeanne, 101, I02n

Feeling: national, 153; and representation, 14-15; and wom en, 17-18, 82-83. $ee also Femininity; Sympathy

Feldman, David, I23n, I28n, I35n, i4on Femininity: and display in East Lynne,

10 1 -2 ,108-9; and feeling in Ruth,82-83; and feeling in Victorian culture,17-18; as sympathetic receptivity, 18. See also Sympathy

Foucault, Michel, 3n, 11, 63n, i6on, i63n, 169-70

Freud, Sigmund, 172 Friedberg, Anne, 3n Fuss, Diana, 5, 1 9 -2 0 ,172n, 178

Gallagher, Catherine, 7, 5 m , 13 on Gaskell, Elizabeth: Mary Barton, 15; Ruth,

13,21,77-94, 115 Geertz, Clifford, 28, 38 Gender: sympathy and, 18,104. See also

Femininity; Masculinity; Sympathy Gilbert, Eliot, 38nGilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar, 78n Gilman, Sander, I 28n , I34n, 141,156n Gilmour, Robin, 53

Girard, R ené, 21, 117,177n Goldberg, Vicki, 42n Grewal, Inderpal, 123n, I27n

Habermas, Jürgen, 116—17, !94Hadley, Elaine, 3n, 103 nHalliday, Andrew, 16, 51-2, 54-55, 61Hard Times. See Dickens, CharlesHartman, Saidiya V., 4nHaskell, Thomas, 43Hobsbawm, E.J., 137Home: as representation, 36, 104—11,

115-16

Identity: aristocratic, 80,103; beggars,52-57; bodily, 1 -2 ,4 -7 ,1 0 —11,13,41,44, 55, 5 8 -60 ,62 ,72 -3 ,90 , h i , 133,138-39; capitalists, 49, 51; cultural, 4,10,12-13,23,127-28,142-43,158-59,160-79; as cultural narrative, 166—69,174—75; definition of, in Daniel Deronda, 134—37; detectives, 66—73; and disguise, 17, 57,78, 83,111-13; and forgetfulness, 89-91; gentlemans, 48, 53; group vs. individual, 171-72; homosexual, 161,168-69; Jewish, 122-25,128-29,133-38,140,145,154;

journalists, 64; liberal subjects, 22,153; loss of, 59, 89-91; middle-class, 7-9,13,18-20, 87, 89-90,94,103; and narrative, 63,153-54; national, 130,132-33,153;and opium, 69—70; politics, 22—23,156—57, 167,178; professional, 66—72; self-con- structed, 145,153-54; and social control, 48-49;“true” vs.“false,” 53-65; wom ens, 17-18, 8 2 -8 3 ,101-2 ,108-9. See also Capitalism; Subject; Sympathy

Interpellation, 6, 38, 41. See also Althusser, Louis

Jackson, Russell, ii5n , 116 Jaffe, Audrey, 32n, 59n Jameson, Fredric, 55n Kaplan, E. Ann, 100, io in , i02n

Index 183

Knight, Stephen, 65n Kristeva, Julia, 132, 168 Kucich,John, 8on, io6n, n o

Lacan, Jacques, 12, 178Langan, Celeste, 4n, 7, n n , i53nLangland, Elizabeth, i o i n , I 0 2 n

Lesjack, Caroline, I32nLevinson, Maqorie, ignLinehan, Katherine Bailey, I33n, 137Litvak, Joseph, n o , i47n, i5onLloyd, David, 129; and Paul Thomas, n 6 nLovell, Terry, 78n

Mackenzie, Henry, The Man of Feeling, 3 on “The Man with the Twisted Lip.” See

Doyle, Arthur Conan Marshall, David, ion, 55-6 Masculinity: sympathy and, 16-17, 3on Mayhew, Henry, London Labour and the

London Poor, 16, 48, 51-57, 61, 63-4, 69 McClintock, Anne, 98n Metz, Christian, 27, 31, 41 Meyer, Susan, i55n Michaels, Walter Benn, 160, 169, 179 Middle class: attitude toward beggar by, 51;

attitude toward gentleman by, 51; em o-tional economics of, 105; structure o f identity in, 5-9; w om en of, 101—2. See also Identity

Mill, J. S., I40n Miller, Andrew, 104 Miller, D. A., 32n, 48n, 96n Mitchell, Sally, 97n, ioon, 115 Moretti, Franco, I32n, I53n, 163 Most, Glenn W , 72, 73n Mulvey, Laura, 34

Nationalism, 17,129-30, 133, 138-40,142, 153. See also Identity

N ew ton, K. M ., I35n Nietszche, Friedrich, 82n Nord, Deborah Epstein, 3n Nunokawa,Jeff, i6on, 162, i67n, 168

Nussbaum, Martha, I5n, 2on

Oliphant, Margaret, 99n, 108Our Mutual Friend. See Dickens, Charles

Perkin, Harold, 67The Picture of Dorian Gray. See Wilde,

Oscar Porter, Dennis, 67n Press, Jacob, i8n Psomiades, Kathy Alexis, i8n

Ragussis, Michael, 124 ,135n, 145, I52nRajchman, John, I5nRessentiment, 8 1 - 8 2 , 8 8 - 8 9 , 9 1 * i : 3Richards, Thomas, 36n, 104Riede, David G., 4nRuskin,John, 17, 53nRuth. See Gaskell, Elizabeth

Scarry, Elaine, I 2 n , 49—50, 72n Scheler, Max, 82, 87 Schor, Hilary, 78nSedgwick, Eve, i6on, 164, 166, i69n Sennett, Richard, 3n, 14, I9n, 22 Sensation fiction, 96, 99 Sergeant, Adeline, ii5n Shuttleworth, Sally, 116, ii7 n Silverman, Kaja, 2, 5 -7 ,9 ,1 3 -1 4 ,1 7 ,3on, 162 Smiles, Samuel, 17, ii2 n Smith, Adam, 2, 3n, 4 -5 , 8, i o - n , 13-14,

22, 67, 82n, 83, 179 Sollors, Werner, 163 Spectacle: class associations of, in East

Lynne, 105; and degradation, 112; and desire, 33—36; and distance, 32; everyday life as, 35-36; home as, 106-8, 116; Isabel Vane as, 97, 112; and middle-class life, 107-10; society o f the, 28; sympathetic object as, 112-13; and sympathy, 2, 37—38; woman as, 34,101—5. See also Spectatorship; Visuality

Spectatorship: and cultural life, 29; and desire, 33-39; and identity, 11; and

184 Index

Spectatorship: (continued)ideology, 28, 31; and sympathy, 30-33,37,100-101; theatrical, 116; and violence, 117,151—52. See also Spectacle; Visuality

Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White, 7£>n, 8 1 ,155n, I56n

Staves, Susan, 79nSterne, Laurence, A Sentimental Journey,

3 onStewart, Susan, 99nSubject: capitalist, 1-3,11, 43; and con-

sumption, 39; liberal, 11, 153-54,179; national, 131—33; and representation, 43-44. See also Identity

Sympathy: and cultural identity, 12,127-28; as cultural narrative, 8, 13, 154-55; and degradation, 117,127,139,149, 156-57, 159-60,165-66; and exchange, 4 ,16,129; and femininity, 17-18,104,108; and gender, 18,104; and identity politics, 2 2 -2 3 ,156~57; and lib-eral subjectivity, 22, 131—33; and mas-culinity, 16-17, 3on; and money, 16; and narrative, 16, 153-54; and ressentiment,

81-82, 87-88, 91; and violence, 117-18; and visuality, 10-11, 29. See also Femininity; Identity; Masculinity; Spectacle; Subject

Theatricality, 100, n o , 113, 115-17, 145, 149-51

Tillotson, Kathleen, I5n Todd, Janet, 31, 86n Trilling, Lionel, i20n

Visuality: 9-11, 37-38, 98-101, 103-4; and interpellation, 31—32; and sympathy, i o - n , 29. See also Spectacle; Spectatorship

Weber, Max, in Weiss, Barbara, 49n, 5m Welsh, Alexander, 13 m , i49n Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray,

13, 18, 22,158-79 Witemeyer, Hugh, i22n, I29n W ood, Ellen (Mrs. Henry), East Lynne, 12,

21, 95-118 Wordsworth, William, 4n